Guide: How To Shoot And Key Green Screen Footage

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Published: June 10, 2019 | Last Updated: September 12, 2025

Part two of my articles covers the basics of green screen and chroma key. If you missed part one, which covered general green screen knowledge, check it out here.

This article will address the question: How do you properly use a green screen and chroma key?

Here are the most important things to consider when using a green screen for a shoot: 1) Lighting is paramount. Diffused, even lighting is needed on the screen. 2) Your subject should be lit separately from the green screen. 3) Your subject should be positioned at a distance from the screen so that he/she does not cast shadows or create light spills onto the green screen. 4) Your camera should have proper color balance and exposure settings. 5) Finally, in post-production, use Chroma Key to pull out the green and replace it with whatever you want.

Without further ado, let’s break it down step by step in more detail below! Watch some of the videos along the way, which make for some good supplemental show-and-tell.

How To Light A Green Screen

The correct lighting setup will save you or your editor a lot of headaches in post-production when dealing with green screen footage. Two lighting setups are needed to get the desired result.

The first setup should focus entirely on lighting your green screen. The goal is to light the entire screen as evenly as possible with no outsized pockets of brightness or shadow.

Consistency is the name of the game, which is usually the opposite of traditional set lighting designed to evoke moodiness or contrast. Therefore, it is an easy mistake for first-time green screen shooters to make.

Use Soft And Diffused Lighting For The Green Screen Background

Soft light is a must to evenly light a green screen. Pointing an uncovered light at a green screen will create harsh falloff and unevenly expose your background, making it nearly impossible for your editor to pull a clean key.

To soften the light, you need to use diffusion. Diffusion is a fancy term for silk or other semi-transparent sheets of material that soften the light. To diffuse the harshness of direct light, you must place the diffusion in front of it, covering the light.

The easiest method is to purchase a kit of softbox lights. They come equipped with silks that attach easily to the boxy frame of the light. While intended for photography, these work very well for green screen lighting.

If your budget is tight, DIY always works. Grab any thin white sheet you have, or even a plain white T-shirt, and affix it to your lights. Be careful how hot your lights get; you don’t want to burn your diffusion!

Light Positioning

For a basic lighting setup, a minimum of two lights should be enough to cover your green screen evenly.

Place them a few feet from the screen (out of the shot) at about a 45-degree angle.

This placement and diffusion on your lights should prepare your screen camera!

Subject Positioning

Once the background is ready, it can be tricky to determine exactly where your subject’s green screen should be placed. A general rule of thumb is that the further you are from the screen, the cleaner the key.

A good range to place your subject is around ten feet from the screen. If your space is tight, five or six feet could work, too, but any closer and you risk a messy key that will spread to your subject.

Further back is better if you’re unsure about placement or can’t measure it. The reason is simple: the more distance, the harder it is for color to spill from the green screen onto your subject. Also, when your subject is at a good distance from the screen, shadows from your subject won’t fall onto the green screen.

When you achieve the perfect distance, ideally, there will be no spill onto the subject from the screen and no shadows cast by the subject on the screen. This is what we mean by a clean key—separating the subject (foreground) and screen (background) so that the chroma key software recognizes the distinction and keys out only the desired portion of the frame.

Color temperature

The color temperature of the lights you use to light the green screen is also essential.

It is recommended that you use a color temperature of 3200K, a.k.a. tungsten. This gives you a nice balanced image, with green that is neither too blue nor too orange.

To learn more about lighting and color temperatures, read our Video Lighting Guide Part 1: Different Types of Light.

Subject Lighting

Once your subject is in place, you can theoretically light them how you wish since their distance from the screen should protect the screen itself from any shadows thrown by the subject.

We don’t all have ideal studio setups, however, so you may need to fiddle around and make sure your subject’s lights don’t impact the screen behind them in any way.

The classic three-point lighting setup generally works fine. If you don’t have space for a backlight, use a simple two-point key and fill setup on your subject.

Once your lights are set up for both subject and screen, you’re nearly ready to shoot! Let’s move on to the last thing we need to check, which is…

Camera Settings

You’ve done a lot of hard work setting the lights up just right for shooting, so it would be a shame to invalidate it all with an incorrectly calibrated camera.

Here are three things to check to make sure your camera is set correctly for your green screen shoot:

1. Exposure—Ensure the image is exposed correctly and the screen registers as green in the camera. You won’t get a clean key if the image is too dark or too blown out.
2. Resolution—Keep the resolution as high as possible. The more detail recorded, the easier it will be to key accurately.
3. Color Temperature—Ensure the camera’s white balance is set correctly for the lights you use. As I wrote earlier, I recommend you use tungsten light with a color temperature of 3200K. This gives you a nice balanced image where the green is neither too blue nor too orange. So make sure to set your white balance to 3200K as well.

And that’s it from a production standpoint. Once your footage is shot, ingested, organized, and ready to edit, then comes step two:

Chroma Key – Premiere Pro

There are many editing platforms out there that offer this functionality. Still, I will cover Premiere Pro here. Premiere Pro has many tools for editing green screen footage in the Keying folder under the Effects tab. There are two choices: the basic Color Key and the Ultra Key. While similar in functionality, I will cover the Ultra Key because it offers more fine-tuning options.

Ultra Key

• Once your green screen footage is in the timeline, drag the Ultra Key effect onto it.
• In the Effects tab, use the eyedropper icon to select the green background to be keyed out.
• In the Setting dropdown, experiment with each choice to see which setting is best for a clean, total green key—relaxed, aggressive, or default.
• If your image is noisy, all is not lost. The Matte Generation object can help. It can be adjusted to help key out any pesky highlights or shadows stubbornly clinging to your image. Play with the settings to see what gets you the best look.
• Use the Matte Cleanup option to work your edges like a meticulous barber. The Choke feature shrinks the edges of the key, and you can fuzz them up with Soften (similar to Feathering in Photoshop).
• Spill Suppression can help fix the edge colors if your subject still appears slightly green-tinged despite your best efforts. You have four settings to play with to fix any color spill: Desaturate, Range, Spill, and Luma.
• The Color Correction tab can help to saturate or pop your colors more if your lighting setup or camera wasn’t correctly set during shooting. This is your last chance to help get a clean key by differentiating the colors.
• Finally, with your key set, grab the clip or image replacing the green, and drop it into the timeline under the keyed footage. This will leave the unkeyed footage visible while showing the replacement footage in the “empty” space that was keyed out. Think of it like laying a partially filled-in overhead slide over another one. The bottom one shows through in the empty spaces of the top.

Last-Minute Adjustments

If you still don’t get a key you’re satisfied with after tweaking all the settings above, then some emergency fixes might be simply cropping, resizing, and reframing your shot.

Remember when we said to shoot at the highest resolution possible? If you did, you’ll have some leeway to crop and zoom without noticeable quality loss. This can help you clear out pesky parts of the frame that (hopefully) aren’t too close to your subject.

Summing Up

These are the basics of shooting and keying green screen video. You may run into some issues the first time you do it, but take it as a learning experience and remember that each successive time will be that much better.

Once you’re comfortable shooting and keying green screen footage, you’ll develop your own tricks and shortcuts. When that happens, feel free to return and let us know what tips you’ve gained from your experiences!

If you liked this article or have something to add, comment below and let us know.