**Overcoming Virtual Green Screen Challenges**

As someone who has experimented with virtual green screens, I can attest to the frustration that comes with achieving a decent result without investing in professional equipment. In this article, I will share my experience and tips on how to overcome common challenges when using virtual green screens.

**The Struggle is Real: Adding an Image Mask Blend**

One of the first steps in creating a virtual green screen is to add an image mask blend. I started by choosing a circle that would serve as the center of my video, and then applied it to the group. However, instead of getting a clean result, I ended up with a terrible tart line behind me. This was a humbling experience, but it taught me the importance of patience and attention to detail when working with virtual green screens.

**Chroma Key vs. Color Key: A Tale of Two Techniques**

When I went back to record another video, I realized that I had used the wrong technique for my color key. While chroma keying is a more advanced technique that requires specialized software, I should have stuck with it instead of using color keying, which resulted in a green outline around my body. This mistake taught me the importance of choosing the right tool for the job.

**Snap Cam Window: A Game-Changer**

When I used the Snap Cam window with chroma keying, I was able to eliminate the unwanted green line behind me. The Snap Cam window is a feature that allows you to preview your video in real-time, which makes it easier to adjust and refine your settings. This tool has been a game-changer for me when it comes to creating virtual green screens.

**Adding an Image in the Background**

One of the most effective ways to enhance my virtual green screen is by adding an image in the background. I experimented with different images, from a blurred game room background to a soft blue background, and found that each one had its own unique benefits. By using these images, I can create a more visually appealing virtual green screen that adds depth and interest to my videos.

**Experimenting with Blur**

I also discovered the power of blur when it comes to creating a virtual green screen. By adding a Gaussian blur effect to my background image, I was able to soften the edges and create a more seamless transition between my body and the background. This technique can be applied to any background image, making it a versatile tool for creators.

**The Perfect Background: A Matter of Personal Preference**

When it comes to choosing the perfect background, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. What works for me may not work for someone else, and that's okay. I've found that experimenting with different backgrounds and techniques can help you find the look that works best for your style and preferences.

**The Final Touches**

After months of experimentation, I finally settled on a virtual green screen setup that works for me. By using a combination of chroma keying, image masking, and blur, I was able to create a seamless transition between my body and the background. Of course, there's always room for improvement, but this setup has been reliable and effective for my needs.

**Getting Feedback: Join the Conversation**

If you're struggling with virtual green screens or have suggestions for how to improve my technique, I'd love to hear from you. Please join the conversation in the comments section below and share your own experiences and tips. Together, we can create a community of creators who are pushing the boundaries of virtual green screens and exploring new ways to enhance our videos.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enokay listen i'm tired of this i'm tired of my background how can i expect to go pro if i can't even have a nice background i think that me and my friend are ready to go pro that's what this video is about i'm gonna show you virtual green screen options that you have today that you can use for free in obs and you'll be good to go so number one is actually a plug-in for obs by streamfx it's called background removal and they have it built in so you can just add it as a filter and it will remove the background so all you have to do is search for stream fx you'll come to the stream fx for obs studio page all you need to do after that is go to download scroll down find whatever platform you're on in this case i'm in windows and you're going to want to install stream fx for windows now i already have that set up here in obs to be able to show you how it works now i wouldn't say this is the best option i haven't had a lot of success with it but i'll show you it anyway so now that your camera is up go ahead to your video capture device go to filters right mouse click in the audio video filters section and add background removal and there you go now this is sort of a two-step process you can actually come down and mess with some of these settings i find that the different ones may or may not work too well media pipe is the only one that seems to work decent for me if you adjust the threshold you can see it comes in and comes out you can filter the contour of the image you can smooth the silhouette but you can still see that there's a little bit of waviness around my body and that's not really something i'm looking for but it's a viable option what you're going to want to do in this particular case is select a green color so you're pretty much just simulating a green screen and you can still see the quality of this isn't that great my arm's getting cut off a lot of jiggly's around me but i just think that that's my background's not optimal for this but if you keep watching there are some more options later on in the video that you'll be quite surprised about so make sure you stay till the end okay so now that we have a green screen in the background all i really have to do is go back into the filters and i'm going to add a color key what that allows you to do is basically key out any specific color that's in the background in this particular case i'm choosing green i'm going to up the similarity a little bit more up the smoothness a little bit more try to get rid of that little bit of a green halo that i have around you can adjust the contrast keep the opacity up so if i close this now you'll see that i'm basically sitting here with no background if i go ahead and grab myself toss me down here in the corner maybe while i'm streaming that might not be too bad for you one of the things you can do is add a image select an image let's go ahead and select i don't know let's pick just go ahead and pick this background right here hit okay what that does is it basically puts it into your scene now if you want to take this put it right where your body is and then in the sources drag it behind the camera now you've got a little bit of a colored background that you can have so you can see how this can be versatile you might be able to adjust it and change it and tweak it to fit your needs but i don't think it's the best option let's go ahead on to the next option okay so for this next option i'm gonna go with something that actually works with my machine and it might work with yours as long as you have an nvidia graphics card now what this is is called nvidia broadcast so i'm going to go ahead and swap over there to show you exactly how this works so to use this software all you have to do is go to the nvidia broadcast app and download it install it to your machine make sure you have an video card to be able to do this and once it runs this is what the app looks like you have control of choosing your microphone speakers and camera now i've selected my camera from this drop down list so you can see me in the preview window here so in the effects area you can choose the effect that you want to do so let's start with background blur and there you go so you can see within here it's actually blurring the background that's behind me and does a pretty decent job so let's check out what else they have background replacement so you can see it's kind of picking up my chair behind me it's replaced the background here so it's not working a hundred percent but it is working pretty decently even if i move forward or backward i i think you could tweak this and get it a little bit better move my head over a little bit you're allowed to basically choose the background that you want so let me go to the backgrounds folder that i have i'm going to go ahead and choose this one right here sure why not in this particular case it's cut off because that's where my camera is cut off so it actually looks like i'm kind of sitting in front of sitting behind this table which is actually a rug but you get the idea the fact that you can use this nvidia broadcast software to basically remove your background i'm a little bit disappointed that my chair gets a little bit fuzzy but again this is the one of the you know better options but not the best option you do have a couple of other effects here background removal altogether and then you also have auto frame which allows you to i think move around yep so as you move around it'll follow you and auto focus on your face that's pretty nice and then some video noise removal or you can just remove this effect and you can actually layer these effects on top of each other i'm just gonna in this particular case do background removal and then when we hop back over to obs what i can actually do is add a new video capture device and from the list of video capture options i'm able to choose nvidia broadcast and there i am with the background removed so let's go ahead and toss me down here in the corner so again if i'm streaming live on twitch or if i'm streaming on youtube i can have myself right here in the corner while i'm going for it and you know what i think this back definitely could be fixed with a little bit better lighting but it's a pretty decent option so the next option is as you can see we are in the zoom meetings app now what you can do with zoom is also remove the background and then use this video feed as a direct feed into obs so let's go into the camera background settings choose my virtual background and i can choose to blur the background let me try to move this over here blur the background i can choose a different background i can choose my own background so i've added a couple here you can see i'm sitting in a room let's see here here's another room here's that other room we used from before you can choose a flat color like this you can choose to have a green screen in the background and then remove that within obs but in this particular case i'm going to go ahead and choose this one right here so once you've chosen your virtual background inside of the zoom meetings you can hop back over into obs now in this particular case with zoom you're going to want to add a window capture we're going to want to have to change the capture method to windows 10 and there we go hit ok and here i am now you can notice that there's a little bit of a border at the bottom and top and that's fine we can go ahead and crop these out if we want move me over into the corner here and depending on how you want your setup to be there you go and i think that's pretty impressive looking to be honest looks like i'm kind of sitting in that room except for you know there's a little weirdness when my hands disappear but at this point in time it's looking pretty good so let's go ahead and do one extra thing here and let's add a image mask blend and if you've watched any of my other videos you know that you're basically just choosing to mask out part of the image based on the color of the image and there we go now i'm over here in the corner and depending on what i want my background to be that's what it's going to be in here so let's go ahead and try something else let's go back over to the zoom meetings go choose virtual background and i'm going to add let's see here i'm just going to add a solid color let me scroll down here choose a solid color i don't think that looks looks as good as before any other images i might want to choose okay let's try this one here it is setup and zoom and here it is in obs studio i can go ahead and disable this image mask blend bring the whole thing full screen and i think one of the things that i do have an issue with with the zoom software is it does seem to down sample the quality i don't think that the quality of this is as good as what i have over here without the background in you can see it's a little bit more crisp a little bit more clear with me using my iphone but again if your whole goal is to have a background get rid of what's behind you and maybe use it on part of the screen i think at that point in time it's looking great okay so this last option is actually kind of a fun one it works as a green screen but you have a couple different options that you can use in obs depending on what you want to do it's the snap camera all you have to do is download the software and then open it up and here we go and i am a potato okay so let me go ahead and click a couple of these different ones oh there's me with a floral head i'll put some all right anyway as you can see this could get a little bit fun let's put some googly eyes on me for now hello hello how are you today all right never mind back to the greens so what this allows you to do is basically scroll through their huge huge list of different filters that you can add in fact you can create your own different filters in this particular case i really do want to start clicking on a couple of these to see how they look but i gotta stay on target i gotta stay on target okay let's type in green screen and you can see there's a bunch of different green screen effects here pick the first one not so great and that's just my eyes and my lips it's great but not great for our purposes and here's what looks pretty decent let's go ahead and just use this again like i said you can go ahead and keep experimenting with this in this particular case i think with better lighting or a better setup i can get a better result so if we go ahead and jump back over to obs and i'm going to add this in this particular case it's nice because this adds as a video capture device just like a camera choose snap camera okay that looks okay looks like there's a little stuff going on behind my ear here i leave everything as a default so once you have this set up we can do what we did before and we're gonna add a chroma what is it color key and basically just remove the green from the background as much as possible okay so it looks like i have a little bit of a green fuzz around me it might be just the resolution of my camera go ahead and stick me in the corner and if i'm streaming any games or if i'm doing anything like that it's that's going to look great and it looks pretty crisp and pretty clear so if i want to do a full screen we can turn our image back on and there i am sitting in the room now you can see there's still a little bit of problem with my ears and there's still a little bit of problem with the outside around me but i'll tell you what both any of these options are good one thing you can actually do in this particular case is let's leave me and we're going to re scale this image here a little bit and i'm going to go ahead and grab these two by hitting controls let's grab the video capture device and the image and i'm going to group them together and what that allows me to do is basically scale it as one item okay so if i want to go ahead and toss myself over here in the corner again and then on the group i want to go into the filters and i'm going to add an image mask blend choose my circle again there we go now instead of having a terrible tart behind me i've got a pretty decent looking screen and you know what with more tweaking and more changing i bet i can get this looking pretty good okay so it turns out i made a little bit of a boo boo uh when i was adding the colored key i should have been adding a chroma key and with color key we were getting that little bit of green outline so i wanted to jump on here and make another video just to kind of show you an example of the video without that green line using the chroma key instead so here you go okay here we are using the snap cam window with the green screen behind me you'll still see that i have a little bit issue with the filter here on my ear this one's a little bit better because i have a direct light coming from this side but i think that with a few tweaks that i could get it looking awesome but let's go ahead and add the magical filter of chroma key there we go without even any settings you see a little tiny bit of the green above my body but it is so much better than it was when i was recording before let's go ahead and add an image in the background here and there we go it's still not a perfect solution but it is a solution you can do today and it's free and it works way better than some of the other options i did like zoom but the problem with that is that for some reason it seems like zoom is really down sampling the image i guess that's because they want to send it out over zoom meeting and zoom calls and they don't want it logging down their servers we can try a couple more images here if you're interested so i could be talking to you like this blurred background looks okay for this situation oh awesome game room image so if i wanted to have a little bit of rgb behind me that would also work here's another example of a background and again you can take this into any image editing software and give it a blur in fact we can give it a blur right here if we want just go into filters add blur i like to choose gaussian blur and then just decide exactly how much you want hit close and there we go i think that's looking pretty nice here's an example of just a soft blue background if you don't want anything extravagant in the background i generally like to have a little bit more going on in the background so that things like this are less noticeable here's another living room background with a little bit of a blur on i think this looks pretty nice also but i usually tend to sort of fall back on this one this is the one i'll probably end up using for a little while or i'll make my own remember you can experiment and do whatever you want with the images behind you there's tons of different options so i think at this point in time i'm going to shrink me down into the corner where most time i'll live i'll go ahead and add the super pro image circle and that's it i guess you all might know exactly how my background's gonna look from now on but maybe i'll surprise you but thanks for staying on for that little bit of extra clarification from this video but i think all in all we've come up with some really good options to have a virtual green screen without purchasing one that doesn't mean i'm not going to go ahead and purchase a a new goodie pretty soon and have an actual green screen behind me but it's got to be the right one so if you wouldn't mind just comment down below if there's any other virtual green screen options you'd like me to try or if there is a good green screen option that could fit behind me in front of this tarp remember i don't have a lot of room i'm just sort of sitting in this chair here with the tarp directly behind me so please comment down below i could use any help you can give me and that's gonna do it if you stayed this long at least like and subscribe i'm trying to grow this channel and i'm trying to become pro so thanks youokay listen i'm tired of this i'm tired of my background how can i expect to go pro if i can't even have a nice background i think that me and my friend are ready to go pro that's what this video is about i'm gonna show you virtual green screen options that you have today that you can use for free in obs and you'll be good to go so number one is actually a plug-in for obs by streamfx it's called background removal and they have it built in so you can just add it as a filter and it will remove the background so all you have to do is search for stream fx you'll come to the stream fx for obs studio page all you need to do after that is go to download scroll down find whatever platform you're on in this case i'm in windows and you're going to want to install stream fx for windows now i already have that set up here in obs to be able to show you how it works now i wouldn't say this is the best option i haven't had a lot of success with it but i'll show you it anyway so now that your camera is up go ahead to your video capture device go to filters right mouse click in the audio video filters section and add background removal and there you go now this is sort of a two-step process you can actually come down and mess with some of these settings i find that the different ones may or may not work too well media pipe is the only one that seems to work decent for me if you adjust the threshold you can see it comes in and comes out you can filter the contour of the image you can smooth the silhouette but you can still see that there's a little bit of waviness around my body and that's not really something i'm looking for but it's a viable option what you're going to want to do in this particular case is select a green color so you're pretty much just simulating a green screen and you can still see the quality of this isn't that great my arm's getting cut off a lot of jiggly's around me but i just think that that's my background's not optimal for this but if you keep watching there are some more options later on in the video that you'll be quite surprised about so make sure you stay till the end okay so now that we have a green screen in the background all i really have to do is go back into the filters and i'm going to add a color key what that allows you to do is basically key out any specific color that's in the background in this particular case i'm choosing green i'm going to up the similarity a little bit more up the smoothness a little bit more try to get rid of that little bit of a green halo that i have around you can adjust the contrast keep the opacity up so if i close this now you'll see that i'm basically sitting here with no background if i go ahead and grab myself toss me down here in the corner maybe while i'm streaming that might not be too bad for you one of the things you can do is add a image select an image let's go ahead and select i don't know let's pick just go ahead and pick this background right here hit okay what that does is it basically puts it into your scene now if you want to take this put it right where your body is and then in the sources drag it behind the camera now you've got a little bit of a colored background that you can have so you can see how this can be versatile you might be able to adjust it and change it and tweak it to fit your needs but i don't think it's the best option let's go ahead on to the next option okay so for this next option i'm gonna go with something that actually works with my machine and it might work with yours as long as you have an nvidia graphics card now what this is is called nvidia broadcast so i'm going to go ahead and swap over there to show you exactly how this works so to use this software all you have to do is go to the nvidia broadcast app and download it install it to your machine make sure you have an video card to be able to do this and once it runs this is what the app looks like you have control of choosing your microphone speakers and camera now i've selected my camera from this drop down list so you can see me in the preview window here so in the effects area you can choose the effect that you want to do so let's start with background blur and there you go so you can see within here it's actually blurring the background that's behind me and does a pretty decent job so let's check out what else they have background replacement so you can see it's kind of picking up my chair behind me it's replaced the background here so it's not working a hundred percent but it is working pretty decently even if i move forward or backward i i think you could tweak this and get it a little bit better move my head over a little bit you're allowed to basically choose the background that you want so let me go to the backgrounds folder that i have i'm going to go ahead and choose this one right here sure why not in this particular case it's cut off because that's where my camera is cut off so it actually looks like i'm kind of sitting in front of sitting behind this table which is actually a rug but you get the idea the fact that you can use this nvidia broadcast software to basically remove your background i'm a little bit disappointed that my chair gets a little bit fuzzy but again this is the one of the you know better options but not the best option you do have a couple of other effects here background removal altogether and then you also have auto frame which allows you to i think move around yep so as you move around it'll follow you and auto focus on your face that's pretty nice and then some video noise removal or you can just remove this effect and you can actually layer these effects on top of each other i'm just gonna in this particular case do background removal and then when we hop back over to obs what i can actually do is add a new video capture device and from the list of video capture options i'm able to choose nvidia broadcast and there i am with the background removed so let's go ahead and toss me down here in the corner so again if i'm streaming live on twitch or if i'm streaming on youtube i can have myself right here in the corner while i'm going for it and you know what i think this back definitely could be fixed with a little bit better lighting but it's a pretty decent option so the next option is as you can see we are in the zoom meetings app now what you can do with zoom is also remove the background and then use this video feed as a direct feed into obs so let's go into the camera background settings choose my virtual background and i can choose to blur the background let me try to move this over here blur the background i can choose a different background i can choose my own background so i've added a couple here you can see i'm sitting in a room let's see here here's another room here's that other room we used from before you can choose a flat color like this you can choose to have a green screen in the background and then remove that within obs but in this particular case i'm going to go ahead and choose this one right here so once you've chosen your virtual background inside of the zoom meetings you can hop back over into obs now in this particular case with zoom you're going to want to add a window capture we're going to want to have to change the capture method to windows 10 and there we go hit ok and here i am now you can notice that there's a little bit of a border at the bottom and top and that's fine we can go ahead and crop these out if we want move me over into the corner here and depending on how you want your setup to be there you go and i think that's pretty impressive looking to be honest looks like i'm kind of sitting in that room except for you know there's a little weirdness when my hands disappear but at this point in time it's looking pretty good so let's go ahead and do one extra thing here and let's add a image mask blend and if you've watched any of my other videos you know that you're basically just choosing to mask out part of the image based on the color of the image and there we go now i'm over here in the corner and depending on what i want my background to be that's what it's going to be in here so let's go ahead and try something else let's go back over to the zoom meetings go choose virtual background and i'm going to add let's see here i'm just going to add a solid color let me scroll down here choose a solid color i don't think that looks looks as good as before any other images i might want to choose okay let's try this one here it is setup and zoom and here it is in obs studio i can go ahead and disable this image mask blend bring the whole thing full screen and i think one of the things that i do have an issue with with the zoom software is it does seem to down sample the quality i don't think that the quality of this is as good as what i have over here without the background in you can see it's a little bit more crisp a little bit more clear with me using my iphone but again if your whole goal is to have a background get rid of what's behind you and maybe use it on part of the screen i think at that point in time it's looking great okay so this last option is actually kind of a fun one it works as a green screen but you have a couple different options that you can use in obs depending on what you want to do it's the snap camera all you have to do is download the software and then open it up and here we go and i am a potato okay so let me go ahead and click a couple of these different ones oh there's me with a floral head i'll put some all right anyway as you can see this could get a little bit fun let's put some googly eyes on me for now hello hello how are you today all right never mind back to the greens so what this allows you to do is basically scroll through their huge huge list of different filters that you can add in fact you can create your own different filters in this particular case i really do want to start clicking on a couple of these to see how they look but i gotta stay on target i gotta stay on target okay let's type in green screen and you can see there's a bunch of different green screen effects here pick the first one not so great and that's just my eyes and my lips it's great but not great for our purposes and here's what looks pretty decent let's go ahead and just use this again like i said you can go ahead and keep experimenting with this in this particular case i think with better lighting or a better setup i can get a better result so if we go ahead and jump back over to obs and i'm going to add this in this particular case it's nice because this adds as a video capture device just like a camera choose snap camera okay that looks okay looks like there's a little stuff going on behind my ear here i leave everything as a default so once you have this set up we can do what we did before and we're gonna add a chroma what is it color key and basically just remove the green from the background as much as possible okay so it looks like i have a little bit of a green fuzz around me it might be just the resolution of my camera go ahead and stick me in the corner and if i'm streaming any games or if i'm doing anything like that it's that's going to look great and it looks pretty crisp and pretty clear so if i want to do a full screen we can turn our image back on and there i am sitting in the room now you can see there's still a little bit of problem with my ears and there's still a little bit of problem with the outside around me but i'll tell you what both any of these options are good one thing you can actually do in this particular case is let's leave me and we're going to re scale this image here a little bit and i'm going to go ahead and grab these two by hitting controls let's grab the video capture device and the image and i'm going to group them together and what that allows me to do is basically scale it as one item okay so if i want to go ahead and toss myself over here in the corner again and then on the group i want to go into the filters and i'm going to add an image mask blend choose my circle again there we go now instead of having a terrible tart behind me i've got a pretty decent looking screen and you know what with more tweaking and more changing i bet i can get this looking pretty good okay so it turns out i made a little bit of a boo boo uh when i was adding the colored key i should have been adding a chroma key and with color key we were getting that little bit of green outline so i wanted to jump on here and make another video just to kind of show you an example of the video without that green line using the chroma key instead so here you go okay here we are using the snap cam window with the green screen behind me you'll still see that i have a little bit issue with the filter here on my ear this one's a little bit better because i have a direct light coming from this side but i think that with a few tweaks that i could get it looking awesome but let's go ahead and add the magical filter of chroma key there we go without even any settings you see a little tiny bit of the green above my body but it is so much better than it was when i was recording before let's go ahead and add an image in the background here and there we go it's still not a perfect solution but it is a solution you can do today and it's free and it works way better than some of the other options i did like zoom but the problem with that is that for some reason it seems like zoom is really down sampling the image i guess that's because they want to send it out over zoom meeting and zoom calls and they don't want it logging down their servers we can try a couple more images here if you're interested so i could be talking to you like this blurred background looks okay for this situation oh awesome game room image so if i wanted to have a little bit of rgb behind me that would also work here's another example of a background and again you can take this into any image editing software and give it a blur in fact we can give it a blur right here if we want just go into filters add blur i like to choose gaussian blur and then just decide exactly how much you want hit close and there we go i think that's looking pretty nice here's an example of just a soft blue background if you don't want anything extravagant in the background i generally like to have a little bit more going on in the background so that things like this are less noticeable here's another living room background with a little bit of a blur on i think this looks pretty nice also but i usually tend to sort of fall back on this one this is the one i'll probably end up using for a little while or i'll make my own remember you can experiment and do whatever you want with the images behind you there's tons of different options so i think at this point in time i'm going to shrink me down into the corner where most time i'll live i'll go ahead and add the super pro image circle and that's it i guess you all might know exactly how my background's gonna look from now on but maybe i'll surprise you but thanks for staying on for that little bit of extra clarification from this video but i think all in all we've come up with some really good options to have a virtual green screen without purchasing one that doesn't mean i'm not going to go ahead and purchase a a new goodie pretty soon and have an actual green screen behind me but it's got to be the right one so if you wouldn't mind just comment down below if there's any other virtual green screen options you'd like me to try or if there is a good green screen option that could fit behind me in front of this tarp remember i don't have a lot of room i'm just sort of sitting in this chair here with the tarp directly behind me so please comment down below i could use any help you can give me and that's gonna do it if you stayed this long at least like and subscribe i'm trying to grow this channel and i'm trying to become pro so thanks you