Behind The Scenes With A Green Screen

Welcome back! Since so many people have commented about my videos, I've made an episode where I show you how I make myself appear in the lower right corner with a crisp, clean image.

We're going to depart a bit from my usual interactive format, because I don't expect you to pause and setup a green screen on your own during this episode.

So sit back, relax, and enjoy the tour as we go behind the green screen.  Please enjoy the "Equipment Tour" video where I show the lighting rig from a "behind the scenes" view.

You'll see how to create the overlay where I screenshare my MV, with myself appearing on screen too.

I'll show you what tools I use for the green screen, lighting, camera, microphone and software.

I'll also give you a few hot tips on how to present yourself so your presentations look clean and professional, without feeling any stress.

Focus on your Content, instead of your Tech setup!

You can find the usual Audio version and Transcript below.

Thanks for watching.

EQUIPMENT TOUR

LINKS

Green Screen Fabric

Stands and frame package

Lighting package

USB camera

USB mic

ecamm streaming software

AUDIO

TRANSCRIPT

Hey, it's Steve, welcome to the User Experience podcast number 10. Today I'm going to depart a little bit from the MemberVault content and talk about how I do my videos with me in the corner of the screen on top of the screenshare. Looking so crisp and cut out, I'm happy that a lot of people have commented, oh, it looks cool, or your videos look professional. Well, guess what you can do this too. And after two years of being on Zoom meetings and screen sharing, I'm sure you're familiar enough that you can get over the hump to make a higher quality professional video.

For example, if you want to host webinars and show a member vault and teach about your offers, you could set yourself up like this and look really, really good. The big advantage of having yourself cut out in the corner is that people can connect with you emotionally through your facial expressions and tone of voice as you share your excitement about your MemberVault products or offers or programs or whatever it is. And there's no downsides, you don't have a distracting background. You don't have a big rectangle cut out, you don't have the grid view of all the other people, it's just you. It's just you and the member Bob, you can talk about your offers and your content, tell people what's going on. And I want to show you how I set that up today. So you're going to need to spend a little money about $100 or $150, or something like that for the equipment, and then activate some kind of video streaming software to get your camera and you into the internet to share what you're doing. So I thought the other thing is I made a video tour of my room where I walked into the room with my camera, and I filmed the lights, the microphone, the camera up here, I showed you the setup that I'm standing in.

So you can get an idea of what it all looks like from the outside perspective, this is actually a real green screen. That's all these are all real objects. This is not a background overlay, what you're looking at is basically a piece of fabric behind me, it's just the distance of my elbow away, there is a metal frame up here. And you can see there are some closed pins, clamps holding it on, it has an adjustable height and size. And I'll show you at the end where I got this on Amazon, it's actually very inexpensive right now, which is fantastic.

Then I've got the microphone up here and the camera we're going into. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to zoom in with my camera until you don't see any other room, all you see is green because the software is going to cut out the green part and replace it. The only rule here is you cannot wear a green shirt because then your head is going to be floating in space. You can see the microphone is a little bit in the frame. That's okay for right now. This is something I would do if I were starting a webinar and I wanted to introduce myself to a new audience and say, Hey, I'm Steve, welcome to my member vault I'm going to show you about my show you about my programs. Let's get started.

But of course, I don't actually want them to see a green screen. So I'm gonna go into my video software. And this is universal, every software these days, even Skype and zoom have an option to indicate green screen. And what this does is tells the computer, I am using a green screen and I want you to cut out the background. Now I just click the button, and I'm on the home office. Oh, one button, here I am in the green screen. Here I am in the home office, let me show you how cool this is. Just to make sure this is really clear. Here I am looking at my room. Just like in the very beginning, you can actually see the frame the closed pin, my hand goes above the frame, watch what happens to my hand, when I click green screen. Everything that was green is now a home office. But the rest of the room is still there. All those objects are real, they're really there. So this is why you need to frame your camera shot and zoom in enough that they only see the green screen on your camera. So that when you activate the switch and replace the background, it looks believable, because if they see the home office in space with surrounded by, you know, file cabinets, that's not going to be believable.

And then you can always have fun and choose different backgrounds. Yeah, I teach on the beach, you know, whatever you want to do. Or you can be let's keep it on the home office because that's basically irrelevant to the content. Now, that's a basic green screen setup when you want to just have yourself on video connecting with your audience and be in a clean space with no distractions. But a lot of times, what I do is I want to teach something about a program like member vault or about a piece of software. So what I'm going to do is enter screenshare mode in my video software, share screen. And now you can see, I'm down here in the corner and I can drag this anyplace I want I could put it in the upper right upper left, obviously you don't want to put it in the center of the screen. And the home office at this point is taking up more screen space than I want. And it's sort of getting in the way. So what I'm going to do is activate green screen. There's another switch called transparent, which just basically removes the whole green screen itself and puts me right where I want to be invisible. I can move the mic just inch out of the frame.

And there you go. You can hear me you can see me I'm in the corner I can illustrate what I'm doing and say I love this stuff. You know obviously any kind of fun entertaining stuff that you want to do as a communicator or teacher or leader. You can do that from on screen so people see You. And then while you're talking about your products, you can go into whatever you're doing on member vault, Exit Preview mode, you know, and do all this stuff that you want to do to show people. Oh, here's my program, this is what you get, when you sign up, here's what you're going to learn, here's how it's going to help you and your life, and all that kind of thing. So to keep this short and sweet, I want to just show you what I'm using in my studio that you could get for your house or office to accomplish some of this stuff. So number one, just the plain green screen, that's a piece of fabric. And if you search the word green screen on Amazon, you'll find a whole bunch of them different sizes, get the one that's right for your your place. And you could literally put this up on the wall with some tacks, or nails, or even temporarily hang it on something like a door and have a background that's replaceable, reusable, keep it clean, that's all you got to do.

What I bought was a green screen kit, type in green screen kit, and you'll get the metal frame with the clips to hold the fabric. And the green screen itself, it does not come with the camera or the person teaching yoga. The point is that you get a frame to hold it up and keep it flat. It's best to keep it flat if you have wrinkles turned into shadows and shadows turn into glitches in the background that make it look artificial. So you want to have good lighting to keep it a uniform green background, so that the software can just remove the green and show you only what you want. Now if you want to do actual, like on screen lessons of teaching yoga or taking having yourself on a chair with your whole body in view, you would need to get a big, a big green screen that covers the floor. So you can actually walk on top of it, the camera can get your whole body with the green screen and view and nothing from the rest of the room, then the green part gets removed. And there you are sitting in a chair on wherever background you want to be on. Next up the lighting kit is really important. This is how we accomplish two point lighting, one on the right one on the left. So you're equally illuminated from both sides. And the green screen behind you is illuminated because believe it or not, if there's a shadow on the green screen, it's going to be a glitch that looks bad on the presentation.

So this lighting kit, it's amazing. This is only $45. Right now, I think it was $70 when I bought mine. So you know $35 For the green screen kit $45. For this that's under $100 to get a fantastic background, nice lighting. And you can keep moving forward. Now you could do this, at this point with just a laptop built in camera built in mic, two lights and a green screen and you're ready to go. I picked out a couple of things. For purposes of illustration, this is a USB microphone, all you really need to know is USB mic. And the reason I picked this one is because because it comes with a clamp and a gooseneck that's adjustable. So you clamp that on your desk. And then you could take the mic and position it so it's close to your mouth so people can hear you. And it's a little bit to the side. So people don't see it on camera, I just just hit mine with my hand. That's another thing you don't want to do. So if you can find a package deal, and Amazon is great for this, if you can find a package deal with a microphone, a stand, a clamp and the USB cable, you can get that for a really decent price. So search around and find something that fits your budget.

And then finally, if you want to upgrade from your laptop, or a built in desktop camera, just search USB camera and find something for the price point that you like. This one has a little clamp that goes on top of your screen mount. But again, if you want the flexibility to position your camera above you a little bit, that's the best. You don't want to look down on your camera because people are looking up your nose, it's better to have your camera at eye level or a little bit above your eye level. So you're naturally looking up into the camera, the lights coming down on your face, you don't have any big shadows of you know, leaning down. And actually, that's better for your breath and diction to be speaking up as if you're speaking to an audience far away at the back of the room. improve your public speaking skills by getting the camera up higher.

These are little presentation tips I like to give out because it makes you feel good, makes you more confident about how you're looking. And then when you watch the replay, it's gonna feel like wow, look, that's me on screen. It looks so awesome. So that's all the last thing if you're curious, I'm using a software called ECAM live. This is for Mac OSX. So I'm not gonna go too deep into it. But basically, this is the program where I open it up and tell it recognize this camera, recognize this microphone. combine them together and go out to YouTube or Facebook or any place you want to stream to that software just collects all those things. You've seen this in zoom and Skype, you you may have seen it in the Facebook Live options where you go into Live Mode, and it says connect your camera connect your mic, that's the same exact thing. It's just taking the USB inputs, combining them into a video and sending it out to wherever you want to stream or like I'm doing today. I can put it on record mode and I'm just recording, nothing live, no comments, nothing to manage. It's just recording what I'm doing. And that's all it is.

So let's go back to camera land. Here I am on camera land finishing my presentation and to make it real let's go backwards. Undo transparent switch and I've got the home office background. I'm going to undo the Greens Screen switch. Now you can see the green screen and I'm going to manually on the camera, zoom out. So this is just one camera with no tech layers, nothing artificial. This is all real. This is an actual green screen. And you can see I have one light bulb down there, that bottom corner, maybe I can show you this. That bottom corner makes a shadow. You see how that that shadow under here is kind of glitchy and it looks like the office is gone right? If I zoom in even more, that just doesn't look professional in the bottom corner. So I added one more let light source just a dumb little desk lamp. Under here, you don't see the lamp, you don't really see the light, but it makes that shadow disappear. That's a really good I'm glad I did that. That's a good illustration.

Let's go back out. Zoom out here the light bulb is on. You can see the home office illusion is in place all the way to the bottom. If I remove that light source, we get a shadow on the green screen. That's the green screen shadow, there's a dark corner back down there. That's the green screen shadow, there's a dark corner back down there. And when I go into green screen mode, the computer can't cut out the green because it doesn't see green it sees a dark shadow. So an evenly illuminated green screen is the key to your success. Which is why I recommend getting a two point light source left side right side coming in at you from above. Put your camera up high. Take care of the details.

And that should be all, thank you so much for watching! And now with our new comments feature, you can drop a comment under this blog post and let us know what you think. Or, if you have any questions I'll be glad to help you out. Thank you so much for watching and thanks for being part of MemberVault. See you next time.