Setting up the screen
Any green cloth works. What matters is not the cloth but the light on it: even, with no shadows and no hot spots.
Light the screen separately from the person. Two lights at forty-five degrees on the screen, then light the presenter on their own. If the presenter is lit by light bouncing off the screen, they will have a green edge no software can fully remove.
Keep the presenter well away from the screen — at least a metre and a half. Most bad keys are a presenter standing too close.
Light the person away from the screen
The key separates the person from the screen by colour, so the two must look different to the camera. A presenter lit only from the front, standing near an evenly green sheet, looks flat against it — same brightness, green bouncing onto their shoulders and hair — and that is when a keyer struggles.
Put a light behind and above the presenter, pointed at the back of their head and shoulders — a back light, or rim light. It draws a bright line around hair and shoulders that no green screen has, and the key follows that line. A cheap LED panel on a stand behind them, out of shot, is enough.
Then light the screen on its own, evenly, and the presenter on their own from the front. Three lights: screen, face, rim. With that, hair keys cleanly and the spill suppression has almost nothing left to do.
Keep the presenter a metre and a half or more from the screen so their shadow does not fall on it and the screen's green does not bounce back onto them.
Pulling the key
Open Chroma Key and click the green. Then turn on the key preview, which shows the matte itself rather than the result.
You want the background pure black and the person pure white with no grey. Grey is where the key will fail.
Raise spill suppression until the green rim on shoulders and hair is gone. Soften the edge until the cut-out look disappears.
The keyer measures the screen as it goes. Its tolerance starts where you set it and rises on its own to cover a creased or unevenly lit sheet, so a dirty screen keys clean without a hand on the slider — what you set is a floor, never a ceiling.
Phone recordings: an iPhone records HDR video by default (HLG), which reaches the keyer flatter and greyer than the camera saw it. Either turn HDR video off on the phone (Settings › Camera › Record Video) before you record for the studio, or leave it and let the automatic tolerance cover it — both key clean; the first keys with more margin.
The moving cut-out that seems to lag a step behind a fast gesture is the person mask, not the green-screen key. With a green screen behind you, choose the green-screen matte: it works on every pixel of every frame and has no lag at all.
Choosing a set
Four studio sets are included. Any image or video you have works as a backdrop, and the marketplaces are full of broadcast-quality studio sets.
Because the backdrop can be a video, screens inside your virtual studio can be playing something.
No green screen at all
Background blur and background removal work on an ordinary room. They are not as clean as a properly lit green screen, but they are good enough for an interview or a desk segment, and they work in a hotel room.