What's up guys. Welcome back once again
to the Gaming Careers YouTube channel
today we're going to be talking about green
screens and how you can use a green
screen within your stream so you can do
cool things, actually one sec, like this!
Now obviously I'll throw some other
examples of streamers using a green
screen and some of the creative ways
that they have used them to incorporate
some funny or epic moments into their
stream but in this video we're going to
be going through why you'd want to use a
green screen for your stream, what
equipment you need exactly and I'm going
to be covering different budgets for
this so right from the cheapest way of
implementing a green screen up to
something more expensive like the elgato
green screen that I've got. We're also
going to be talking about how you can
use a green screen in OBS and streamlabs
OBS, so exactly how you set it up to
chroma key out the background. And
finally I'll be going over some tips and
tricks for lighting and exactly how you
want to set up your green screen to make
sure you get the crispest image. All of
that coming up!
So obviously the main purpose of having
a green screen is to be able to cut your
talent out from their background and
then you can overlay that talent on
your game or maybe it's your
desktop or your twitch chat or whatever
you want to do. But the idea is that you
can have both your your talent and some
sort of background in the same shot
composited one above the other. So what
you're going to need to be able to achieve
this look is obviously a camera of some
sort.
This can be a webcam, it can be
a camera plugged into an elgato
cam link like mine is and basically
the the higher resolution, the more
detail you're going to get and the better
quality the cut between the talent and
the green is going to be. So I would
recommend certainly using one of the
higher-end webcams to achieve really
great results.
Something like the Logitech c920 which
is often recommended. I've been
recommending it in my kits for absolutely
ages. That will do absolutely brilliantly, but
if you have the luxury of being able to
use an actual camera mirrorless or DSLR,
plugged into a capture device like the
elgato cam link, then that will do even
better. In terms of the actual green
screens, it's one of those things that's
going to be completely dependent on your
budget. Here on Amazon I found three
different types of green screen for
three different budgets so hopefully one
of these will be perfect for you. At
the start we've got these sort of
foldable green or blue screens that they
sort of fold up into a circle similar to
some of those pop-up tents that you can
get for camping and festivals and things
like that. So they pack away nice and
small but when they actually open up
they open up to a decent size. The
difficulty with these is that they have
to be hung or placed against
the wall or something like that, so these
are really great if you have the ability
to be able to hang it or to be able to
put it against the wall if that is what
your streaming setup is but they're
super cheap and you know you can't
really go wrong with something like this
for forty dollars. Next up you have the
traditional green screen which is the
green material. This one here is is nice
and large 9 by 15 feet, comes with three
clips but you would need to have a place
to secure it to and most of you I
imagine would have to purchase something
like this, so a studio rail
which is two light stands with a beam
across the top which you can hoop
through the green screen. These are
pretty much what a traditional green
screen setup is, something nice and large,
does take up quite a bit of room but can
pack down quite quickly unless you're
going to leave it up the whole time. But
this is the traditional sort of around
$50-60 when you factor in both the stand
as well as the green screen. Then
finally we have what I have, which is the
new elgato green screen. Well I say new,
it's probably been out for six months or
so now, super handy, super convenient,
packs all the way down into its body has
its own support beams at the back so you
can set it to any height. I've absolutely
loved the product but it is on the
pricey side, so I think this is the ideal
solution and there isn't really any
competitor for it in terms of how
convenient it is and how quickly it
packs away and you can set it up but it
is a little bit pricey, so I understand
for some people this might be out of
budget. The last bit of equipment that
you're going to need is some decent
lighting, now you might not think that
lighting is that much of a key aspect in
terms of a green screens, you actually
need to be able to light both your
talent or your subject yourself I would
imagine, as well as the green screen
separately to make sure that you have
that consistent green color which is
going to make it much easier when it
comes to chroma keying it out. I've got a
couple of examples here on Amazon, the
neewer 160 is a very popular light for
filmmakers, gets very very bright even in
such a small panel or something like the
VILTROX panel as well, there's so
many of these LED light kits on Amazon
I'm sure you can find one that is large
enough for you but the main purpose
obviously is to be able to light
yourself as well as your green screen
independently so you might need to pick
up a couple of these kits. A couple of
tips to do with the actual lighting, the
further away the green screen is from
the talent, so the bigger the distance
between the talent and the green screen,
the less harsh the shadows are going to
be so if you're stood right next to your
green screen and you may have to be,
you're going to get harsher shadows and
in that case you probably are going to
want to light the green screen
separately with a second light source.
Before we jump into OBS and streamlabs
OBS,
one tip would be that you don't want the
green screen to be too narrow
when surrounding your talent or yourself,
you want to have some leeway so that the
person on screen can raise
their hands and things like that without
the hands being cut off because of the
narrow green screen.
The second thing worth mentioning is
that keying out in OBS or any of these
programs is actually quite CPU intensive,
so if you are struggling to keep frame
rates and not drop frames anyway, you
might consider maybe just having a
normal webcam without any keying because
it is a CPU intensive task, your computer
is having to do all the processing of
removing that background information and
so just bear that in mind if you're
having any issues. Ok so here we are in
OBS and the first thing that we want to
do probably is just to play around with
the cropping of our webcam to make sure
that it's completely surrounded by green.
I've just got an example scene set up
here with a picture of
fortnight just as if I was playing it
and my webcam camera in the bottom
corner so the first thing you want to do
is crop the webcam to make sure that we
are completely surrounded by green and
this section just here where you can see
some of my background shelving unit
isn't changed. So to do that you can hold
down the Alt key and drag in any of the
areas that you want to crop, so I'm
just going to drag in the sides a little
bit, so they're surrounded by green and
the top right just a touch and there we
go.
Now I am completely surrounded by green.
My background isn't completely the same
color but it's a pretty good attempt. So
next we're going to be looking at removing
this green background so that I can sit
just on top of the game layer, to do that
we want to come down to the camera
source here or your webcam source, right
click and go to filters, now you can see
in the effect filters list, we do
actually have the LUT that we set up a
couple of weeks ago, so if you haven't
yet watched that video of how to add
filters and LUTs to your webcam to
change the look and make them look
a little bit more cinematic, do go and
check out that video, I'll link it up in
the top card, but we're just going to have
that disabled for now and we're going to
come and add a new effect filter by
clicking the plus icon and selecting
chroma key. Obviously you can name this
whatever you want, chroma key works for
me so I'm just going to leave it at its
default and click OK. Now you can see as
soon as I click OK, OBS has applied its
default settings which is a green chroma
key and you can see it's done a pretty
decent job really, if you look to
the bottom corner where it's already
been cropped, it's not bad. There's a
little bit of green on my shoulders and
in my hair, obviously blonde hair and
light colored t-shirts aren't ideal to wear
for this but I thought I would challenge
myself and get the settings perfect for
you guys. So the first option that we have is
this key color type and you have the
choice between green blue magenta as
well as a custom color, this is just the
color of the screen behind you that you
are wanting to remove so that the most
typical ones are green and blue.
Obviously they've got the option of a
magenta or by keying in your custom
color if you know exactly what it is or
you can use the color picker. I've
actually found that for the elgato green
screen I'm using the green one seems to
work the best so I'm going to leave it at
green and then move on to the other
options. Similarity is on a scale of 1 to
1000 so if you drag this left and right
you can see it's choosing how similar of
a color to the green that they've got
set you want to remove. So if I lower
this you can see that some of the darker
areas in the bottom corners of my green
screen are still showing so you want to
get this to the point where all the
green screen is removed but you know
none of your t-shirt or your body or
your face so around 400 seems to work
quite well for me. Next we have
smoothness and this is how smooth of the
keying effect will be so again you don't
be removing any of your t-shirt or your
hair by going too high so somewhere
around 100 seems to work quite well for
me but this will be completely dependent
on your your setup and your lighting and
all those kind of things your camera. Key
color spill reduction this is just
trying to reduce the amount of spill
that might appear on the shoulders or in
the hair if you certainly if you have
blond hair it's a little bit more
difficult so you're just trying to
remove that spill of green from those
areas and that looks pretty decent
actually. Then finally you have some
options for a contrast, brightness,
gamma, those kind of things I'm going to
leave these all as default but do feel
free to play around if you need to and
then if we can just click close and you
can see that has now applied my green
screen effect and you can see how clear
that is, if I hold my hand up especially
you can see straight through my fingers
onto the green screen. There is still a
little bit of green color in my hair so
I would probably go back into the
settings and just make sure that I'm
fine-tuning to make sure that that is
removed but bearing in mind I haven't
set of any sort of lights just specific
for the background here and I've tried
to make it challenging as possible by
wearing a light t-shirt and obviously
having blonde hair, I think that looks
pretty decent. I'm just going to go back in
and just play a tiny bit just to try and
remove that green from my hair, so I
should be able to play around with the
color spill a little bit and maybe the
smoothness as well and there you go, you
can see it's reduced now and then if you
went back to apply your LUT you can see
that even looks even better, so there I
am in the bottom corner of my screen,
obviously if I put my hands on the
outside of where I've cropped my camera
that's going to remove so I want to try and
remain in this frame as much as possible
but there I am in the bottom corner of
my fortnight game example. If streamlabs
OBS is your your streaming software of
choice the process is exactly the same
as it's part of that core OBS
functionality that was originally moved
across into streamlabs OBS. So all you
have to do is find your webcam or your
camera source, right click, filters find
the color key and make sure you dial in
the settings to be able to remove your
background without removing any of your
subject. Another really important point
is that you want your subject not to be
wearing any of the color that your
background is so if your background is
green avoid wearing any green as that
will also be removed so if you have a
green logo on your t-shirt or something
like that that's obviously also going to
be removed. Another bonus tip for OBS and
streamlabs OBS is it's not just video
capture devices that you can apply the
color keying to, you could also do it to
video so if you find some videos on the
internet that have a green screen you
can also apply the color key in OBS or
streamlabs OBS to a video. One last
thing I will mention is if you are using
a webcam that has sort of some drivers
installed and those things with auto
white balance you're probably going to
want to jump into those options and
disable it because when auto white
balance is enabled sometimes that's
going to mess up what the green looks
like and obviously OBS is looking for a
specific color of green to remove from
the keying so if it's going to keep
changing white balance because of this
auto white balance setting within the
webcam that's going to mess up so make
sure you disable that. The last thing
that I will mention is just to raise the
question do you actually want to remove
your background from your livestream? A
lot of people find that having a
background with you know some things on
shelving units I know I don't have
anything interests
on there yeah but over time I'd like to
think I'm going to build up parts
of my personality and have them on this
shelving unit so maybe a green screen
isn't right for you but if it is I hope
you found this video useful, if you have
please do give it a thumbs up and
subscribe if you haven't already. As
always a massive thanks to the patrons
this month who have helped fund the
creation of these videos do check out my
patreon page if you haven't already and
subscribers I will see you in the next
video. Peace!
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