The 'Green Screen' Effect

Take someone to the islands today with your music!

For the 'Green Screen' effect, I use a program called MAGIX Movie Edit Pro (I have version 16) which has a feature called 'Chroma Key' under video effects in the drop-down menu. It allows you to remove a color from the background (such as white, black, green, mixed colors, et cetera). The basic program is under $100 and has everything that you need to make your own videos, movies (or edit existing ones). You can add sounds, photos, effects, et cetera.

Since green is a very narrow light bandwidth of the light spectrum, it is the most popular color to remove, not taking much of the forefront image with it. This lets you replace the background with anything your heart desires. I thought some billowing ocean waves would be perfect.

The Green Screen is basically a large green sheet, which I paid $18 for from Amazon.com. It can be anything green. It's not a special material or anything. You could buy a green bed sheet at Kmart if they sell them, but it needs to be a lighter green instead of dark. I think buying a Green Screen is best. They come in smaller and larger sizes too. Just hang the green screen behind you as you're video recording.

Make sure there's no wrinkles if possible on your green screen, as it will show up in your final work. You'll see what I mean in this video again of WEAR A LEI (notice the wrinkle in the bottom right corner. That was my Green Screen folded over a bit. It's a lot of fun and a nice way to travel the world with your music without leaving your home. It certainly gives you the opportunity to make some awesome videos to share with others.

Also, which ever photo or video that you want to appear in the background must be on a track before the foreground track. So for example: I put my ocean video on track 1 and then me playing steel guitar on track 3. Tracks 1 and 2 are for the video and audio of the ocean. Tracks 3 and 4 are for the video and audio of my steel playing. The program automatically separates the video and audio into two separate tracks, which is really nice. You can replace the audio with something else. In the case of my video at the beginning of this page, I reduced the ocean waves in volume a bit because they were fairly loud and I didn't want that sound to compete with my guitar playing. The gentle waves breaking in the background are a perfect enhancement to any Hawaiian song. There's a "Help" section of the MAGIX Movie Pro program that explains how to do Green Screen, but it's under "Chroma Key." Of course, there are other video editing programs too, but I'm not familiar with them. I like MAGIX Movie Pro a lot.

The following video is the song, STORMS NEVER LAST. I made a few mistakes playing the song, but I just made this quick video to show you the "Green Screen" effect. I think it's a really nice thing, rather than having the same background all the time. And what's really nice is that you can even have a moving background, such as waves.

In the first video you can see the Green Screen in the background. A picture is worth a thousand words as they say...