From the course: Green Screen Techniques for Photography and DSLR Video

Why use green screen for video?

From the course: Green Screen Techniques for Photography and DSLR Video

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Why use green screen for video?

Rich Harrington: A lot of folks watching this video are newer to video, maybe they are photographer shooters, and even those have been doing video for a long time, there is a lot more to shooting green screen for video than there is for photography, and I think people don't always understand the reasons of why we shoot green screen. Abba Shapiro: Now, before we get into that detail, if they haven't watched the earlier movie about the advantages of shooting green screen, I think they should go back and watch that because that really does cover a lot of the reasons why you want to shoot green screen for both profitability and ease of post. Rich: Absolutely, and I think the main thing here to take away is that I've seen people try to do keying like luma keys for video or we'll shoot on a dark background, we'll knock that out. Oh, there's this great new feature in After Effects, the Roto Brush, we'll cut them out. You can rotoscope where you cut people out of the backgrounds. You could do all this complex work, but it is never as good as a good key, and that's because you're going to see chattering in the matte, it's going to look jumpy, you're going to have weird edges, it's going to be feathered too much. So it really becomes necessary to say, you know what, I want that flexibility. I want that ability to swap out the background. I am going to shoot this right. I think people just need to realize that there are some technical advantages, and I think one of the big things that we should just get out of the away right in the beginning is a lot of people say, well, why blue screen or why green screen? I think unless there's a really good reason if you're shooting video, green is the way to go. Abba: Yeah, and the reason green is the good way to go is because we look at our skin tone, and if you've looked at a Color Wheel is that skin tone is the opposite side of Chroma key green. So when you start removing the green color, you don't have to worry about removing the skin tone, and that works really well because of the sensitivity of video cameras to the color green. What about blue? Rich: Well, blue is going to work well for a couple of things. Blue has less noise in a film workflow. But when dealing with video, the really only reason to shoot blue is if your subject and the clothing choices have a lot of green in it. So if you need to key a product that has green, go to blue. If you need to key a situation where you've got somebody wearing green clothing or using a green product, go to blue, otherwise, for most video, stick with green. I think it's pretty straightforward. Now, the post-production side of this is more complex. In Photoshop, it's so easy to just make a quick selection to the background, hit Delete and Done. With video, we start to get more needs to adjust the lighting in post-production to really refine the matte, and video has just more limitations because the image is so much more compressed. Abba: It's interesting to notice that people do move. You talked about this and yes, you can go rotoscope which is frame by frame, but when people move, green screen is much easier to track when you're actually doing the post-production, and they have to remember that, if you just been shooting a lot of stills, and you start using that video part of your camera, the ability to shoot video and kind of mix it up, then using green screen is a lot more valuable than using a black or a white background. Rich: So, this is all about future flexibility and the ability to make changes. We've teased you enough and have preached to you about the benefits of this. Let's jump in and start to see the techniques. We're going to light the studio, and then we'll bring the model in, and we'll get some great stills and video.

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