If I hadn’t written a post about it a few years ago, it would be one of my best-kept photography secrets: I often use my monitor and some bokeh shots I’ve done over the years as a background for product photography.
Taking a page from that test book, Epic Light Media shows you how to go one step further and create convincing faux backgrounds for videos using your television screen.
It’s a little more difficult to apply the concept of still photography to video. After all, in still photography, I’m looking for a clean photo and the ability to do a lot of post-production work on the photo. For video, it’s more demanding to get it in the right scene, as it can be quite difficult to deal with reflections or poor lighting in post-production on video.
Their latest video above talks about the challenges of filming with a screen. If you are curious about the actual device and structure, you can take a look Previous video about that is here.
Part of the difficulty with filming has to do with the screen itself. Because this isn’t a high-end seamless video wall, part of the challenge is hiding the TV’s seams where they meet. To do this, the team used color gradients that matched the color palette of the background they projected onto the TV. The second key element to successfully pulling off this composition was to get those bands out of focus with a very shallow depth of field. In the case of the interview here, they used one Sigma 85mm f/1.4 DG HSM Art lens and a speaker probably can’t move much from where she’s standing for fear that she’ll leave the razor-thin field of focus that such a wide-aperture lens creates.
There are a lot of challenges around adjusting the lighting for the scene being used, as well as turning off the lights to avoid reflections and lens flare. Finally, you want to arrange something so the speaker can watch the footage in real time to avoid problems.
Does all of this sound like it’s actually happening on location? Of course not. Is it a lot cheaper? Sure.
Check out the video above for all the detailed shooting tips for such a setup if you want to try it yourself.
