First, What is it?
Filming on green screen is when you film on an evenly lit green backdrop. Then in editing an effect is used to delete all the green pixels and make them transparent. With that done, any background can be put on the layer below the subject. So, instead of standing in a home studio in Ormond, you can look like you’re on a beach in the Bahamas, or on mars for all I care.
What’s the Point
Of course green screen is used for lots of special effects and compositing in movies and TV. You can fall off a cliff, be in an alien city, drive a car in the safety of a studio, present the weather or News – what ever you can imagine. But for the business videos I make, it’s usually more mundane. If you want to be positioned in a large auditorium or a prestigious board room but can’t arrange that easily, green screen can do it. You can also be sure of getting good sound.
Here’s another example from a client’s product landing page.
Sometimes it works to have a plain or gradient background, with the presenter to one side and ppt slides, animations or text on the other. You can get imaginative, eg 3D text coming from behind the subject, or match a rising hand motion with a growing bar graph.
In my view, filming in a real location is usually superior though. It’s not always easy to match up lighting, colours, reflections, movement and scale between the subject and a background. Ie its not always convincing. Sometimes when you remove the green in editing, there can still be ‘spill’ or reflected green on the sides of the subject’s face or in their hair. Sometimes I spend so much time trying to fix, match and colour correct, you’d have been better off just hiring the right venue.
Come Try Out The New Studio
That said, it’s easy and low cost. I’ve just fixed up my green screen studio. Ceiling mounted lighting, new carpet and acoustic attenuation makes a huge difference. 
The Atomos recorder I use makes the green much easier to extract in post, by doubling the colour subsampling (to 4:2:2 colour space).
So come over for a chat and try it out. Get in touch.
See you soon
Keith Rhodes, Director
ClipsThatSell.
