If I hadn't already written an article about it a couple of years back, it would be one of my best-kept photography secrets: I often use my monitor and some bokeh shots I've made over the years as a product photography background.
Taking a page from that tried-and-true playbook, Epic Light Media shows you how to take that one step further and create convincing fake backgrounds for video using television screens.
It's a bit more difficult to take the still photography concept and apply it to video. After all, in still photography, I'm looking for that one clean shot and have the ability to do copious amounts of post-production work for the photo. For video, there's more of a requirement to get it right on the scene, since it would be pretty difficult to deal with reflections or poor lighting in post for video.
Their latest video above talks about the challenges of shooting with screens. If you're curious about the actual gear and the build, you can check out their earlier video about that here.
Part of the difficulty in shooting involves the screens themselves. Because it's not a high-end seamless video wall, part of the challenge is hiding the seams of the TVs themselves where they meet. To do this, the team used colored strips that match the color scheme of the background they're projecting onto the TVs. The second key ingredient to making this work is to throw those strips out of focus with very shallow depth of field. In the case of the interview here, they used a Sigma 85mm f/1.4 DG HSM Art lens and a speaker that probably couldn't move very much from where she was standing lest she leave the razor-thin field of focus that such a wide-aperture lens produces.
There are a lot of challenges around matching the lighting for the scene being used, as well as flagging off the lights to avoid reflections and lens flare. Finally, you'd want to rig something up so that the speaker could view the footage in real time to avoid issues.
Is all of this the same as actually going on location? No, of course not. Is it a lot cheaper? Definitely.
Check out the video above for all of the detailed shooting tips for such a setup if you want to try it for yourself.
Love this set up, I can't help but wonder if it could be more simple to set up with a projector screen rather than 3 LCD screens? You'd probably need to up the ISO and dial back your lights, but it would eliminate a lot of complications of using multi LCD screen and be cheaper?
I've shot with projector screens in the background and they just don't show up as cleanly as the TVs do. It could be because they weren't the highest quality projectors though.