How to Edit with Chroma Key / Green Screen Videos

Chris Pirillo — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 02:40:12 +0000

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I’m still surprised at how many of you accepted the first community challenge I threw out regarding green screens! Since I thought the response was so great, I bought a green screen of my own so we can do these once a week! Do you know how to edit these videos?

In order to edit one of these, you’re going to need a video editor that supports a Chroma Key (or at least the editing of these types of videos). If you use Mac OS X, iMovie 09 works amazingly well. Using the Chromakey plugin of iMovie allows you to intelligently blend two movies. This is more than applying a simple transparency mask, because it allows you to target any color in one of your movies and make that color transparent.

I opened iMovie and opened up the movie of Pixie. I clicked to show Advanced Tools in iMovie, in order to be able to play with the Chromakey features. I dragged and dropped the Pixie clip into the work area, and selected “Green Screen”. I had a picture I took in Alaska already loaded, so dragging Pixie around made her appear to be sitting in front of a mountain in Alaska! It’s that simple and that easy to do.

Now you know how to do this easily in OS X. I’ll keep doing these as long as all of you want to keep remixing them! If you use Windows, I’m not leaving you out! You can use the free CineGobs. It’s low budeget movie making with a Chromakey feature… and it works.

To me, it’s easy to drag the video into a static image and create something new. Let’s see how creative you can get with it. Show us how good you really are! I plan to upload a new one of these every Friday, so get going and create!

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How to Edit with Chroma Key / Green Screen Videos

Chris Pirillo » cinegobs

How to Edit with Chroma Key / Green Screen Videos