Confessions of a Green Screen Newb

 I have a confession to make. I love green screen effects when done correctly, but I cannot do them correctly (yet). Today I making a video to introduce myself to the Education Exchange. Since the conference in Australia got postponed in February and turned digital this month, everyone is introducing themselves online. I thought it would be fun to make a short video of myself "traveling" to my home office/computer.

I took my green screen out to the car and started to record my plan. I knew the glass would have a reflection, so I rolled down all the windows. Sadly, the glass wasn't the issue. The lighting was. Since the lighting caused many shades of green to show in the green screen, the chromacast couldn't remove them all. After many tries, I gave up and instead created an outtake video.

I assume the issue was the lighting, but there are other factors that could had caused this issue as well.

1. My green screen is wrinkled and therefore the fold makes cause the variation in greens.
2. My green screen is thin and therefore the light can get through it easily. If I was using a thicker "black out" curtain type material, it would probably work better for controlling the light.
3. I was outdoors so I couldn't control all the external factors.
4. I should probably have added multiple layers in my editing software to remove the shades of green. Will that work? It's how I sometimes fix the same issue in still shots. Note to self: try re-editing the video with additional layers.

Green Screen Before and After

I also notice when I do pictures, I often have a green halo around my subject. Around the hair is the worst offender. Although it doesn't look wrong around the hair in this example, here is a before and after that shows the shadows I was referring to before. You can see that between my arm and body the shadows make the screen darker. In a still shot, it's easy to remove the multiple shades of green. Now to just figure it out for the video.