Hello there, video guys. Uncle Vince here and I'm here to blog to you about how to basically properly light a green screen. In order for your green screen work to really look realistic and to be able to pull this off, you want to make sure that your lighting is very well prepared, so in this little blog, I would like to share 4 cool tips with you on effectively lighting your green screen.
Cool tip # 1: Use the same type of lighting to ensure your lighting is consistent
What kind of lights did you use to light your green screen? Well, it doesn't really matter what type of light it is, whether it's fluorescence, tungsten, or LEDs. The trick is to ensure that your lighting is consistent by using the same type, for example, LED, because what you want to avoid is using a fluorescent or LED light on one side of the screen and then using a tungsten or different type of light on the other side. This will cause your green screen will get a sort of different green because each type of light has a different colour temperature. For example, fluorescent lights have a higher colour temperature than LED lights. Lights often have a warmer, kind of yellowish colour temperature to them, so if you can just keep that in mind, whatever you're using to light your green screen, use the same lights all around.
Cool tip # 2: Light positioning
Basically, you want to make sure that your green screen is lit up by the lights that are positioned in a way that they give a nice even spread of light across your screen. You can use a truss or if you're just using light stands, which is fine too. You want to make sure that you try to set them as evenly as possible so that you get that nice spread. Besides that, you want to make sure that you set them far enough back from your green screen to where your green screen isn't blown out to break and again so that the light has enough room to spread.
Cool tip #3: Positioning your talent
Positioning your subjects in a way to where they are not too close to the green screen. In fact, as you get closer to the green screen, you will start casting shadows on the screen. Now in some cases, that's good. Sometimes you want to have a shadow because you're doing some kind of cool special effect, but most of the time when you're keying with virtual sets and other things, you want to avoid casting shadows on your green screen. To light your subject, a basic 3 point universal lighting setup is a good way to set up lights. You basically have a key light, you have a fill light, and you have some nice back lights. Now, depending again on your scene, you can arrange those in many different ways, but the position of the lights is very important. You want to make sure that your lights that you're using to light your subject aren't going to interfere with that nice lighting that you have on your green screen, so try to think about keeping those separate. Don't try to use the same lights that you use to light your green screen.
Cool tip #4: Scene illumination
My final cool tip that I want to suggest is scene illumination. In other words, what is the overall illumination of the final scene? For example, let's imagine that behind me I'm going to put a scene of a beautiful field with some trees, and the sun in that scene is coming from up here in this direction, nice and bright. All the trees in the scene are casting shadows going that way. But let's imagine though that in the studio here I decided to put my key light, my main light, over here on this side of my face and my fill light over here. What's going to happen? Well, most likely, people that watch your livestream are going to think that something looks really phoney or fake about that video. Most people don't realise what it is, but if you don't get your lighting right, it's just going to look fake, so you want to make sure if the sun in your scene is coming from this way, you want to have your subject brightly lit from the side when you composite. So, if you're doing a virtual set, say you're using a great product like Obs or Vmix, and you have this wonderful virtual set, that virtual set has all kinds of blues and red in different colors, and that's part of the scene illumination, what would you do? Well, you might use some RGB LEDs or light gels on your lights that have some of those blues and red in different colours to light your subject again so that they blend in perfectly with the scene. Use light cutters to block unwanted light too, that's it.
I hope you enjoy this short blog on how to effectively light your green screen!
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