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Green screen doesn’t suck, you just suck at green screen – Here’s why and how to fix it

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Shooting on a green screen has become far more common these days. Green screens are cheap and readily available. Most video editing software, not to mention live streaming software like OBS and hardware like the Yolobox Products, have native support for it built-in. But it’s still something that many people struggle with when it comes to video editing with bad keys, dodgy artifacts and other issues.

A lot of people blame the software tools for a bad key, but is it down to operator error? Well, yeah, it probably is. There are many factors in shooting good green screen footage, and in this video, the team at Syrp Lab go through the process and explain exactly what could be causing your green screen issues and how to resolve them.

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How to clean up fuzzy edges and colour spill from your green screen video footage

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Taran Van Hemert is one of the editors at Linus Tech Tips. With the number of videos he pumps out every week, it’s a pretty safe bet to say he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to Adobe Premiere Pro. He’s even posted a 4+ hour tutorial going through his entire workflow. Taran doesn’t put out videos on his own channel very often, but when he does, they’re filled with some fantastic knowledge.

In this video, he discusses the topic of spill suppression and fuzzy edges when working with green screen footage. Unlike the previously mentioned Premiere Pro workflow video, this one’s only a couple of minutes long. So, it’s quick and easy to digest. And the technique can be applied in other editing applications, too.

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Five top tips for pulling better keys from your green screen footage

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Green screening (also called chroma keying) is a very useful skill to have when shooting video. Even if you’re not using an actual grey screen, it can be handy to know how to easily mask out a particular colour, and composite something else in its place. In this video, Jordy at Cinecom walks through the top five things he’s learned when it comes to getting a good key.

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Is 4:2:2 video worth it? Can you even tell the difference over 4:2:0?

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The difference between 4:2:2 and 4:2:0 along with 8-bit vs 10-bit was a hot discussion back when the Panasonic GH5 was announced. It was the first small form factor camera to offer 10-bit 4:2:2 internal, and it confused a lot of people. It still seems to confuse a lot of people, but even if you do understand it, can you even really see a difference between 4:2:2 and 4:2:0?

While only offering 8-bit colour, not 10-bit, Gerald Undone decided to compare 4:2:0 recorded internally on his Sony A7III with external 4:2:2 recorded using the Atomos Ninja V to see if you can really see a difference in the footage. It may not be as significant as you might think.

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Here are four green screen tricks you can make without the green screen

Green screen is a popular and useful tool for creating all kinds of visual effects. You can DIY it, you can even paint it, but there are some awesome green screen tricks which don’t even require it! In this video, Jordy and Yannick of Cinecom.net demonstrate four of these tricks you can pull off without using an actual green screen, but by chroma keying smaller objects.

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How to make your own DIY portable green screen with PVC pipe and a pillow case

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If you don’t quite have the budget to kill off green screen yet, or perhaps even the budget for a proper green screen, there are other options. For Dave Knop, the answer was some green pillow cases he found at his local Goodwill. In this video, he shows us how he turned them into a portable green screen panel with the help of some PVC pipe.

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This 62 year old “Grandma” became a YouTube star after teaching herself how to green screen

Tatiana Subbotina, from Saint Petersburg, Russia, started making videos in 2013 while living in Thailand. The videos were aimed at children. But then she decided she wanted more from her creations. So, she decided to teach herself how to chroma key composite with a green screen and Adobe Premiere Pro. And it’s made her something of a YouTube hit.

With nearly 20,000 subscribers and over a million views of her videos in the past month, she’s certainly doing something right. While her videos are in Russian, some of the comments show that they go simply to watch, even if they can’t understand what she’s saying. Although, YouTube’s fancy algorithms do offer translated subtitles, they’re not always that reliable.

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Adobe’s new deep learning tech might make green screen keying obsolete

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An Adobe Research paper titled Deep Image Matting, might just put an end to green and blue screen techniques. Adobe collaborated with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, to develop a new system based on deep convolution neural networks. This system extracts foreground content from its background accurately and intelligently without any kind of blue or green screen background.

Eliminating the green screen isn’t a completely new idea. Lyryo’s cinema cameras are able to do this based on depth perception. But this solution is 100% software based. The paper outlines the process to evaluate images. It then determines what needs to be cut from the background, and how.

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5 Tips for lighting a green screen for a clean key

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One would think that lighting up a green screen would be similar to working with something like a white seamless backdrop. But there are a few differences. Unlike a white seamless, green screens aren’t blown out beyond your camera’s dynamic range. They can also reflect colour back onto your subject. And you’re usually shooting on a green background for different reasons than white.

In this video, Aputure’s Ted Sim teams up with David Carmichael from Corridor Digital to bring us five tips to light our green screens. The tips, are, of course, aimed primarily at video shooters, but green screen is becoming a common technique with photography, too. Many of us also shoot both stills and video, so having a single set up that can work for both is ideal.

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The Olympic tennis court is a giant green screen and the Internet has noticed

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It’s always amusing when something shown on TV includes something ripe for chroma keying. This time around, it’s the Rio 2016 men’s singles tennis final between Andy Murray and Juan Martin Del Potro.

That they were playing on a giant green screen was noticed by imgur user factionman. After this, the obvious became inevitable. I would imagine these scenarios probably weren’t going through the players’ heads at the time of the game.

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