Here's a reel for a postproduction company that does a lot of greenscreening for TV and movies. It was posted on Mark Evanier's blog. Here it is on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clnozSXyF4k...player_embedded

I watched this earlier today. Really eye-opening!

What's interesting is how many meat-and-potatoes street scenes are green screened. It's not just for monsters, robots and explosions, it appears to be for pretty much any shot you can think of. It makes sense that if you have an exterior shot on a street corner, you can send a second unit to wait til the weather and time of day are right, then just shoot the background. There's no need to get the whole cast and crew to stand around waiting for the sun to be at the right angle and the clouds to clear. I can see where that would just get expensive and unwieldy.

I once saw an episode of some tv show before audio post work was done on it. No ambient sounds, no sound effects, just bare dialog. That gave me a trifle of an insight into just how much work is done in post, but this green screen reel is so much more revealing.

Yeah, you just assume they *wouldn't* have to do these shots as SFX, but if you think about the cost of going to some of the locations, permits, etc. is does make sense.

Speaking of dubbing, I've been re-watching "Star Trek: Enterprise" from the beginning and one of the interviews mentioned the space-age surgeon scrubs that Dr. Phlox and various crewmembers would wear during an "operation" and the actor was saying that they looked great, but they were a real pain because they were made of some kind of rubber and would squeak every time an actor moved ...meaning every line of dialogue would have to be redubbed.

That must be a cool gig...to just concentrate on that one thing. There is some great work there, and some not so great (I did'nt like the shadows added on the characters in front of the Lincoln Memorial.) Overall it is VERY eye-opening to see just how much stuff is done GS nowadays. A lot of that 3D compositing can be done in A:M... I always get 'oohs' and 'ahhhs' when I show a scene thru the camera(1) in A:M and then say 'and now I'll step out from behind the camera' as I hit the T key and actively rotate about the scene.

We do a lot of green-screen work here at GW... I always advise the shooters to over-light the screen if they can...more light is better than less light. The common thinking is 'what does it matter, it's green...it'll just key out' but you'd be surprised how fast green can turn to black which will NOT key out and will require (gasp) rotoscoping to fix. Good find!

Yup. All of my instructors give the same advice.

Matt, how to you guys deal with spill from the green screen? do you use rim lighting?

MoKey or Keylight usually have a spill-supressor built-in. Ultimately, a rim light is optimal for retaining fine detail like hair. But- when you get a director or cinematographer/crew who is used to lighting things in their own formulaic way, and now you ask them to throw a bunch of lights on the screen, and now you ask them to back-light/rim-light the actors---you usually get dirty looks, comments about 'losing the original look' or ' we only have 1 grip truck' or 'are you trying to blow a fuse?'... it's a compromise between the shooter, the budget and the post-facility...which is dangerous for the post-house. Shooters rarely are made to go back and reshoot...budgets are rarely 'upped'...but good post-houses always have to make it work.