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.

Green screen snake