Garbage mattes

By Eric Huyton (Eyefish)

Shooting off the green screen

There will be times when you can't achieve edge to edge coverage with your green screen. For example, if you're shooting a very wide shot and you simply run out of green area. "Shooting off" the green area isn't necessarily a problem though. As long as your foreground subject has a decent border of green screen around it, then the rest of the frame (which isn't green) can be fixed with a garbage matte.

Garbage matte

A garbage matte (so called because it hides the garbage) is laid over your shot in post production and simply covers anything that isn't green with a computer generated green matte. The background image is then composited onto this replacement green background.

This can be very useful as it means you can have lights or maybe a boom microphone "in shot" because you know they will be covered later with a garbage matte.

Green Screen Filming

Pro reference

Michael Goldberg

I recently had the pleasure of working on a corporate video with Michael Goldberg as our producer/director. It was my first time shooting in...

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Pro member

Nigel Buck

Nigel is a freelance Avid and Final Cut pro editor with over seventeen years off-line editing experience, cutting programmes of all genres for both Broadcast and ‘blue chip’ corporate clients.