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Green screen studios are a great way to add life and excitement to your video, or even provide an impressive background for your webcam. With the increase in popularity of green screen videos on YouTube, more people want to get in on creating their very own green screen studio.
Many of these consumers have found themselves struggling to try to figure out how they can make their own videos when they don’t have access to expensive equipment or software.
Well, you’re probably wondering what this article is going on about. Today I’m going to show you exactly how you can create a homemade version of a professional-grade portable green screen studio with a few items that you may already have laying around your house.
What you’ll need: a white bed sheet, stand, lights and tripod. That’s it! Let’s get started.
First, make sure the room is free from clutter and any other distracting objects that may show up in your shot. In addition to this, make sure that there are no windows that will give off a glare or reflections since we want to eliminate all of the light in the background.
There should only be one light source that comes from behind me (that’s why we need our tripod). The next step is to tape down your sheet to make certain that it will not move and create shadows in our shot (I used blue painter’s tape but any clear tape will do).
Typically you would want a large sheet of green material to cover a lot of areas; however, we can get away with using a bedsheet. Simply attach the sheet to your tripod and place it behind me so that I’m standing in front of a blank screen.
Depending on how close you have your light source from the backdrop, you may see some shadows appearing on your clothes or skin.
In order to prevent any issues with shadows try not to use too much light when shooting your video. In this example, I used just one light from above and placed it about three feet from the backdrop.
Now let’s bring things into focus! The last step is to take the picture in order to get rid of all of that extra white space. It’s best if you use a DSLR camera with manual controls in this case, but it can be done with the right settings on your smartphone as well. After taking this picture make sure to upload it onto YouTube and add the green screen effect!
Tips for shooting your footage or photos:
1.) Make sure that when you are taking pictures for your video there are no distractions in the background. If there are vibrations, wind or anything else that may affect your shot take multiple pictures just to be safe.
2.) Auto-focus mode will not work well, so I recommend switching your camera to manual focus (you’ll see why as we work through the rest of this article).
This is to get the best results however it isn’t limiting you to just green. For best results, use a green screen kit.
You can choose any colour specifically for your preference and upload your own background image/video inside of your green screen apps or software like New Blue FX or Xenofex2 (shown in video). It’s recommended you do some research on what other videos and tutorials say about how to best create chroma key images and videos.
But oftentimes everyone will agree that green seems the easiest to work with when chroma keying because it tends to be one of the more forgiving colours that work well with lighting and camera equipment available today. Green has been commonly used as a chroma key for video production as early as the 1970s.
Conclusion:
You can import or upload custom backgrounds into your green screen software.
Chroma key allows you to take any image/video and drop it behind your talent! There are many free apps available for download.
Here’s my final product before adding the background effect:
Now let’s apply our new chroma key footage over this stock photo of a busy city street (I used the New Blue FX Chroma key Studio software). You can see that I was able to place myself in front of some pretty amazing scenery!
