It’s always amusing when something shown on TV includes something ripe for chroma keying. This time around, it’s the Rio 2016 men’s singles tennis final between Andy Murray and Juan Martin Del Potro. That they were playing on a giant green screen was noticed by imgur user factionman. After this, the obvious became inevitable. I would imagine these scenarios probably weren’t going through the players’ heads at the time of the game.
Chroma keying is the process of removing a colour in your footage (usually green or blue) in order to make it transparent. This then allows you to fill in those gaps with something else. It’s a common technique with TV and video presenters to switch out backgrounds for talking heads or interviews. Green screening is also used extensively in movies for visual effects. It’s a fairly straightforward process these days. Many editing and compositing applications have features built right in to support it. You can get started with it quite inexpensively, too. I think the last one has to be my favourite. I can’t wait to see what they do with the Olympic swimming pools. Have you tried green screening the tennis? What did you come up with? What other things have you seen on TV that you’ve keyed out and composited? Let us know and show us in the comments. [Imgur via Verge]
