How to Use a Green Screen for Beginners

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Craig Huggart: Want to make your videos look better with less effort?
Green screen is for you.
Hi.
I'm Craig of CraigHuggart.com, where we talk about happiness hacks from a Christian perspective.
In today's video, I'll give you a step by step guide on how to do green screen with
less stress.
Yes, this is off topic, but I'll get back on topic in my next video.
Keep watching to the end where I'll share with you where you can find professional green
screen backgrounds, like the one I'm using.
Let's start by seeing this shot with the green screen background, and without.
Quite a difference, isn't it?
By the way, some backgrounds are more realistic than others.
The first, and most important, step is get the lighting right.
To light the green screen, I've got six clamp lights mounted on shower rods.
I've put a link to the lights and the bulb I use in the description.
Also, I used wax paper to soften the lights.
One detail is to make sure all the lights are the same color.
All of mine are 5500K.
To light me, I've got two Fovitec softboxes mounted on the ceiling.
These lights are as far away from me as possible and at about a 45 degree angle to help keep
the reflections off my glasses.
You will have to play with the lighting, but once you get it right, you're set.
The goal is to have even lighting on the green screen, and have you lit well too.
The second step is to get the right green screen.
I tried a cloth one and a pop out one.
Neither worked for me.
What I'm using now is specially designed paper, and it works great.
The third step is camera set up.
If you get the lighting right and you get the right green screen, you can shoot from
your iPhone successfully.
That being said, I use a Sony a6000 with a polarizing filter.
The filter is another step in cutting down reflections.
The big thing in the camera set up is getting your white balance right.
Conveniently, on my camera there's a setting for 5500K.
On the iPhone, I recommend the app, FiLMiC Pro.
It's great and makes it easy to set your white balance.
Step four is avoid green on you.
Since we're going to be eliminating the green, you don't want to wear any green.
Now I'll show you how to edit the video and add the green screen.
I'm using Adobe Premiere, but whatever tool you use, the steps are similar.
In the timeline you will see two video clips.
Video two is what I filmed.
Video one is the green screen background video.
The first thing we are going to do is crop the image.
I've taken the crop effect and dragged it to the first clip.
This gives us less variation in the green screen that we have to adjust.
I'm going to crop the left, top and right.
Once we've cropped the clip, then we move on to the effect that makes the green screen
background visible.
In Premiere, Ultra Key is the tool.
This is how it looks after I've dragged the Ultra Key effect onto the clip.
The Key color is the color that we want to remove.
I would normally use the eye dropper tool, but there's a bug right now.
So I used another tool to determine the color and I will just type it in.
You can see that we've got a problem area.
This is because the lighting on the green screen was not perfect.
Changing the output to the alpha channel makes it easy to see the problem areas.
Through trial and error you can find what works best.
In this case, changing the setting to aggressive does the trick.
It's looking good, but I want to check the alpha channel just to make sure.
That is the output we are looking for.
Our work here is done.
As promised, you can find the link to the professional green screen backgrounds in the
description, along with links to other things mentioned in the video and the associated
blog post.
If you liked this video, make sure to tap the like button, the bell button, subscribe
and share it with your friends.
That's a wrap, and I'll see you next time.
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How to Use a Green Screen for Beginners

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