How-to Film with a Green Screen
In this blog we’ll explain the basic steps for filming with a green screen and keying it out for editing. Keying is the process of selecting a color in the video to make it transparent.
First setup your green screen. You can use a paper, cloth, or foldable green screen. In a pinch you could improvise your own. Just make sure there are minimal wrinkles, because those will make removing the green screen more difficult later. The reason for using green is because it's the farthest color from skin tones and easy to avoid in clothing. You can actually use any color you like as long as it's different from the subject.
Next light your green screen evenly. The keying tool will also look at the luminance of the selected color, so having the green screen evenly will make the selection easier. Soft light is preferred over hard light because it will distribute the light more evenly. Using two lights with softboxes is one option to achieve this.
Now light the subject like you normally would. Make sure they are far enough away that they don’t cast any shadows on the green screen. The farther placement will also reduce the amount of green spill light reflected back onto the subject. It's ok if not all of the green screen fills the frame, but make sure the subject is entirely within the green. You can mask out the parts around the subject later.
The main camera settings to change are shutter speed and aperture. Typically we shoot with a 180 degree shutter angle, which is half the frames per second, because it creates a little bit of motion blur. However when filming on a green screen, we don’t want motion blur because it will be more difficult to key out later. So set the shutter speed a little faster, like 90 degrees or 60 degrees. This will eliminate motion blur and get sharper edges on moving objects. You can also set your aperture to a higher f-stop of 4 or 5.6. This will make the edges around your subject sharper making it easier to key..
During editing, apply the key effect. In Adobe Premiere Pro it’s called ultra key. Use the eyedropper tool to select the color you want to key out. Then fine tune the selection using the additional settings until all of the green. If your green screen didn’t fill the frame, create a mask around the subject to remove unnecessary parts of the image. Move the keyed video up a track in the timeline, and place whatever image or video you want in the track underneath.
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