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Green Screen

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

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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.

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.

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.

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.

How to light up a green screen for a perfect key and seamless compositing

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Setting up a green screen to record footage of a subject that will be cut out and composited into another background has become commonplace these days.  What is ultimately a pretty straightforward process, however, can be a difficult one to learn.

This video presented by Doug Guerra from B&H shows us some tips and techniques to help eliminate a lot of the common issues faced, such as colour spill, key fringing around our subject, and only partially removed backgrounds.

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