I had shot on green screen years ago and had a very negative experience.  The process of removing or matte background is called Keying and the earlier versions of this function in Premiere Pro were less than flawless. I had a terrible time cleaning up the matte and had an almost impossible task of cleaning up the Spill. The Spill is those parts of your image that reflect the color of the background and although green is a very good background to remove, it’s not a flattering color on people. I did manage to get it done but not without a great deal of work. From that point on I shied away from green screen processing.

I recently had a client that was very interested in a hero video that we could shoot in a short time period, in the limited confines of my small studio.  He stressed the importance that although the content was just him talking, that he didn’t want it to be just another boring talking head video against a static background.

I discovered that the team for Premiere Pro had added a new tool to the keying suite called Ultra Keying.  It does as it is named and created pretty flawless mattes. The new tools that are included in this function includes a Spill Suppression slider which is what was missing from previous editions. This enabled me to finally render a motion background that I had possessed for year and though I may never use.

Both the client and I were very impressed with the results and I’ll not shy away from the green screen again.