![]() ![]() These fixtures cast a soft light that is quite appealing for your green screen. You can get a six-foot garage-style fixture from your local home hardware store for less than lunch. I’ve had success lighting green screens with long tubular fluorescent fixtures along the top and sides of the backdrop. If you have access to softboxes, they are excellent options for casting evenly spread light. When you’re lighting a green set the color temperature of the instrument is not as important as lighting your background evenly. It helps to move small lights farther away so they cast broader, soft light beams. Hard light sources cast narrow and focused beams that create circular hot spots and leave outer portions gradually darker. Achieving even lighting can be more difficult than you might think. Any variation in lighting will read as gradient coloring and will complicate your key in post. The goal is to light the set as evenly as possible using soft light. If there is a secret technique to getting good keys, it is in lighting the wall. Light it smoothlyĮven a professional-quality cyc wall won’t key well without proper lighting. However, it doesn’t take much more effort to stretch a sheet of green fabric between two step ladders or paint a small section of wall. You can quickly create a functional miniature table-top set with an action figure and a sheet of posterboard. If you need to chromakey a full-body shot of an adult actor, you will need a much larger background.Īnything that’s bright green will work as a green screen, just be aware of texturesĪlso, if you are experimenting with chroma keying for the first time, you can test the process on a small scale before you build a big set. If you intend to chromakey a sock puppet your backdrop may be relatively small. The only requirements are that your background is large enough to fill your screen, smooth enough to take light evenly without showing wrinkles or casting shadows, and bright enough to contrast well with your subject. Texture causes shadows.) What do you need to look for when buying or making a green screen? (NOTE: Be sure to avoid textured walls if you’re painting it green. I’ve produced professional green screen scenes using giant dedicated sets, large professional fabric chromakey backdrops, sheets of material purchased by the yard from a fabric store, smooth walls or pieces of paneling painted with a gallon of dinosaur-green paint from the kids section of the hardware store, even sheets of green poster board taped together. In short, anything that’s bright green will work, and anything that works is valid. Fortunately, there are many options, and many of them are inexpensive. The most obvious need is for the background itself. We’ll cover each of these elements in detail. In order to shoot footage that will key cleanly, you need a green background, a source of bright, even lighting, and a tripod to lock your camera in place. You can erect a simple chromakey setup almost anywhere with just a few basic tools. Fortunately, we quickly pointed out the problem and he was able to find a change of clothes before he went live. Patrick’s Day our wacky weatherman showed up to work dressed head-to-toe in a bright green leprechaun suit. We narrowly escaped a chroma key crisis years ago when I was working at a Northern California TV station. Many people use the terms chroma-keying and green-screening interchangeably, but the principle that powers chrominance keying is not limited to the green parts of the spectrum. ![]() Color keying, or chromakeying, identifies a specific color to remove. Luminance keys are often used for applying mattes. Luminance keying, or luma keying, is the process of keying out a brightness value or range, like black or white. What is chroma-keying?Ĭhroma keying is the process of isolating a single color or brightness value in an electronic image and using software to make that value transparent, allowing another image to show through the affected areas. In this article, we’ll cover all the essentials you need to know to pull off clean chroma keys and composite digital backdrops and virtual backgrounds into your video editing. The green we mean comes in the form of a green screen.Ĭhroma key allows you to take subjects out of the real world and placing them into a completely new world. But to do it right, you’re going to need a lot of green.
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