Muslin Backdrop
How to Make Green Screen Videos With Chroma Key Effect – Use Lighting, Backdrop and Editing Software
Ever wondered how your local weatherman magically appears in front of a map, simultaneously pushing high-pressure systems across the tri-county area and cheesy jokes across the studio at the rest of the Channel 5 Wake-Up Crew?
The one-liners certainly aren’t from magic–more like candy wrappers and popsicle sticks–and neither is the man-in-front-of-map technology: it’s green screening (a.k.a. chroma keying), the video effect that allows Tom in Topeka to appear on the beach in Tahiti, sans plane ticket and sun block.
Whether you’re making a green screen video for your own business or for your own amusement–or for telling Laffy Taffy jokes in front of the Great Lakes Region–you’ll need to properly execute the three main aspects to the process, each of which is necessary to making the illusion of chroma key appear real. Well, real in a fake-looking, news anchor’s smile sort of way.
Backdrop/Background
The Screen “You’re telling me I’ve got to have a green screen for my green screen video? Get out of here.” Yes, obvious, but not that simple. Beyond just green, you need your backdrop to be three things: wrinkle-resistant, non-reflective and uniformly colored, all of which make creating the effect in editing much easier. Many accomplish this by not actually using a “screen,” instead opting for a painted piece of plywood (a fabric definitely resistant to wrinkles). There’s special green screen paint, albeit somewhat pricey, sold for such a task.
Of course, the easiest way to get a good green screen is buying a professional-quality one, usually made from muslin cloth, from the many online retailers who sell them in all manner of dimensions (just do a Google search for “green screen backdrop”). And size is critical: you need to make sure you’ve got enough green to contain all your foreground action. However, eschewing the professional route, I bought my makeshift background at Sears–specifically, in the section designated Softer Side–in the form of a queen-sized flannel bed sheet, notably flat, not fitted.
Hanging It To hang the screen, you can combine two of the aforementioned backdrop methods, attaching the cloth to a board, so as to make the sheet as smooth and flat as possible–remember, that’s important. I accomplish this feat by simply taping my bed sheet to the wall using masking tape.
Lighting
Evenness Lighting is the most critical element to the process, the one that, if done improperly, will sabotage your efforts entirely, making it impossible to key out the designated color range in post-production. And that’s just it: you need as narrow a range as possible of green, so that the software is able to isolate and remove it, while keeping in tact the entirety of your foreground subject. The narrow range is accomplished by evenly lighting the backdrop–a task that is far easier to type about than bring to fruition, made onerous by those evil creatures called Shadows.
See, when you light your subject in the foreground–and you should, by the way–it’s going to send a shadow toward the backdrop, which is going to ruin the evenness (yes, that’s a word). You can lessen the darkness of the shadow by, listen up, putting space between the subject and the background, at least a few feet, several or more ideally. But the better reason for creating this space is to allow room to separately light your backdrop.
Setup For my videos, I use a basic setup of three lights, each of which I purchased at Home Depot. Toward the subject, I face a 500-watt Workforce work light, featuring two independently movable lamps on top of its extensible framework. To light the backdrop, I place clamp lights, holding 200-watt bulbs, on either side of sheet. Getting the lighting right can take a while, and you’ll definitely need a subject to test on, so, if you’re planning shooting on a strict schedule, make sure you allot enough time beforehand and recruit a stand-in to help.
Editing
Software Any of the upper-level editing software systems–namely from the so-called A-team (Avid, Adobe and Apple), as well as from major players like Pinnacle and Sony–will include chroma keying as a feature. I use Sony’s Vegas Pro 8.0a; I learned the particulars of creating the keying effect from YouTube tutorial videos. If you’ve done your lighting properly, summoning the effect is much less complicated and frustrating.
Background Image The background doesn’t have to be a still image; it could be another video. The point is that, before shooting, you should have in mind what you’re putting behind your subject in post, because it could affect on set decisions, including wardrobe. For example, for a video I made recently, because I knew the background would be a darker red, I advised my video’s subject, a business owner, to wear a white shirt, in order to create the contrast necessary to make him stand out.
An important note, also in regard to wardrobe: make certain your subject isn’t wearing anything with green in it, because that will be keyed out along with the screen. So, if you’re subject has a green circle on the chest of his fashionably small designer t-shirt, you’re going to literally tear his heart out in the editing process, leaving only a hole through which your background image will be visible. I’d recommend you avoid such a scenario–unless, that is, you want your video to come across as having no heart.
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