Green Screen Effects in iMovie 09

By Wesley Fryer On February 21, 2010 · · 2 Comments

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Last month fifth graders in the Sunday School class I teach at our church recorded both still images and video to create a “remix” of a music video by the group, “Go Fish.” To seek formal permission for this remixed version, I posted the video as a YouTube response to the original music video. I put the video together using iMovie ’09, and for the first time used green screen effects. After turning on SHOW ADVANCED TOOLS in iMovie preferences, green screen effects are available in iMovie when you drag a green screen video sequence over another one already inserted into your project.

The screenshot-based tutorial, “Mac OS X | How to Green Screen Using iMovie ’09″ on iClarified was very helpful to me in figuring out how to do this, along with the following two YouTube tutorials.

The green screen effects in our video were FAR from perfect, and the students look like washed-out ghosts in several of the sequences. Still, it was great to be able to do this at all, using my iPhone for still images and an older Sony GSC-Netsharing flash-based camcorder for the video shots. Previous versions of iMovie didn’t support green screen effects at all. I think our lighting was a bit blown-out on the green screen we used (over-exposed,) and I really had little idea how to make video setting adjustments to improve the results in iMovie.

Are you a green screen guru with iMovie ’09? If you have any helpful tips I’d love to hear them.

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On this day..

TML

Hi are you using a green screen behind your filming? if not you will need a back drop to the colour of…….. chroma key green…. this can be a cloth or painted wall…… from my little knowledge it will shadow and mix colours if the colours blend…. make sure know person is wearing green at all….. Enjoy and keep your great posts coming.
God Bless
http://www.wesfryer.com Wesley Fryer

Yes, we used a green screen for that “Go Fish” movie but I think the lighting in our room was irregular, so the background was harder to remove. We used a cloth green screen that was suspended from the ceiling behind the kids.