Seeing as there’s a brief lull in the racing action at the moment, we might just be able to squeeze in a quick behind the scenes look at green screen technology. I should declare upfront that this post isn’t remotely related to Formula 1, but a couple of people have expressed an interest in the inner workings of Sidepodcast, so please excuse the self indulgence.
The Early Years
The idea of keying out a single colour from a piece of film has been around since the 1930’s. The principle is simple, pick a solid colour as a backdrop, ensure that it’s not present in the foreground and then replace said colour with other footage during post-production. The techniques for doing this have dramatically improved in the last 70-odd years (while costs have drastically reduced), but the original concept remains the same.
Chroma keying is used in all forms of video production nowadays, the local weather programme is the most commonly seen example, but given its relatively low cost, there’s little reason not to make some use of the technology.
That’s Me in the Spotlight
Although we essentially have no knowledge of television production, when we started making videos it was pretty clear that chroma keying was a great way to turn a very small space into a larger one, and as all we had was a small space, it was worth looking into.
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