Green Screen Studio Lighting
One of the most important concepts in lighting for green screen is that you need to light the screen and subject separately. All of those green screen lighting kits you’ve seen advertised online have given you a false understanding of what is needed to properly light a green screen.Search for green screen light kits and see what comes up. In nearly every case you will find the same basic equipment: a screen, a backdrop support system, and 2 or 3 lights with stands (and maybe a boom arm.) 3 lights are not sufficient to evenly light a green screen and also the foreground talent. You need at least 2 dedicated large soft light sources for your screen plus 3 lights for your subject.
IMPORTANT: Every time I get into a discussion on a forum helping someone who is having trouble with their green screen process some ‘expert‘ always pops up who says I’m making everything way to complicated and that they only use two lights and everything works great. It is absolutely possible to shoot green screen with 2 lights (I’ve done it.) But, every compromise you make at the beginning has a ripple effect through the whole process. Using the same light on your talent and screen increases the chances of uneven light and shadows on the background. What looks perfect during setup can look very different once your subject starts moving around making shadows. Usually the problems go unnoticed until you sit down to edit – and then it’s too late to fix easily. If you expect a high degree of realism in your results, you will regret the compromises you made.
Your goal is a screen that is evenly lit with no hot spots or shadows. The overall brightness should be a little lower than the light hitting your subject. If the screen lighting is overly bright, it will wash-out the color and make it less saturated in the recorded video (and significantly harder to key out later.)
Your light kit should have 5 lights in total:
There are lots of options available for lighting. The home office video lighting report goes into details about the specifications you should focus on when selecting your lights, so I won’t cover that in detail here. If you have the budget, I recommend using daylight balanced LED fixtures for everything. They are durable, flexible, light weight, small, and can be powered by battery. The downside is that they cost more up front than your other options. If you are working on a very tight budget, consider using one of the cheap green screen light kits and supplementing it with a couple of DIY bank lights like the ones in this video. Light the screen with the bank lights and the subject with the lights from the kit.
The main goal for lighting your screen is to create even lighting with no hot spots. Bank lights provide a large soft light source with a wide beam spread. Placing one bank light behind the talent on each side of the screen will create a smooth evenly lit screen with minimal light spill onto the foreground subject.
The process of getting the screen lit evenly can be tricky, because hot spots that can cause trouble in the editing room are often hard to see with the unaided eye. There is a really helpful smartphone/tablet app called “Green Screener,†from Hollywood Camera Work, LLC. It can help you quickly perfect your lighting setup. The app uses the device camera to view the screen and then reduces the color information down to a limited palette which helps you to more easily see where the lighting is uneven.
