Green screens are a staple of modern film-making. In fact, they’re more than that – they’re a staple of all video media. From big-budget blockbusters to bedroom YouTube videos green screen technology is commonplace, but the quality of its usage is not.

Green screens, when done well, can be invisible, to the point where many viewers don’t even realise that what they’re watching is entirely keyed in. On the other hand, they can also be terribly distracting, completely breaking viewer immersion and making it impossible to focus on whatever is happening in the foreground.

The key to this is control. In order to get a green screen working well, you need to be able to match the lighting of the foreground and the background and to do that, you need a level of fine control over the space. And this is where we come to the advantages of working in a studio.

Filming In A Studio

Many people think of studio filming as something that only the top-end productions do, but the truth is that just about anyone can get access to a studio space by renting one. Renting a studio space comes with many advantages but chief among them is the fact that you have far better control over the environment of your scene.

With green screens, this is incredibly important because by far the biggest problem people experience when trying to set one up at home is natural light. For the most part, people love natural light, which is why we do our best to build houses in a way that will let the light in and while curtains can screen out a fair amount of that light, it’s nothing like enough to make a green screen work effectively.

The real problem is that even if the light matches your scene now, it won’t in ten or twenty minutes and, as anyone who’s ever done professional film work will know, almost any scene will take longer than that to shoot.

Using A Studio Effectively

If you want to get the best out of using a green screen in a studio, then it’s important to have everything you need to shoot planned out in advance. Understanding what the lighting of your scene should look like and how you’ll achieve this effect will save you a lot of time when setting up. Even if you have to make changes once you’re in the studio, you’ll arrive at the best solution far faster if you have an understanding of what you intend to do.

All in all, if you want good green screen scenes then renting a studio is the way to go. The results will almost always look better.