Chapter 6. Shooting for Compositing Streaming

Chapter 6. Shooting for Compositing & Streaming

Two applications require specialized shooting techniques: shooting for compositing and shooting for low bitrate streaming distribution. As you can probably guess from the title, this chapter addresses these issues.

Compositing sounds complicated, but really it's not. Simply put, it's the process of merging two videos (or a single video and still image) to display one combined video. Compositing is also called "overlay," as in laying one video over another, "chromakey" or "color key" where you use color values to discern how to combine two videos, or more specifically "green screen" or "blue screen" when using these colors in the compositing process.

This chapter starts by describing how to shoot against a green screen to produce one video you can overlay onto another. The techniques involved in actually compositing the video are highly specialized, so I'll cover the software side as well.

The final section explores different techniques for producing video that looks good even after being compressed to ultra-low bitrates for streaming, and how working with composited video may actually yield improved quality at low bitrates. I'll share the results of some extensive green-screen and black-screen testing, and provide some clear guidelines for producing the best possible streaming video quality.