Is the YoloBox the easiest way to green screen your live videos?
In this video, we're going to find out exactly what it takes.
First of all, why would you want to green screen your videos?
There's a couple of different things you can do with this.
For one, you can put yourself over top of a static picture like this in the background.
You can also put yourself on top of another camera angle, like a top down camera.
You could, of course, also plug in your computer to the YoloBox and green screen yourself on top of whatever's on your screen that you're presenting.
You can also flip it around and bring in graphics from your computer using something like H2R Graphics that gives you a little bit more flexibility about the kinds of things to
show on the screen.
Those are just a few of the things you can do once you're able to green screen in the YoloBox Pro.
We're going to go through this step by step and going to show you how to get each of those effects.
But before we get into the YoloBox part, I first want to talk a little bit about green screening in general.
I'm not going to get super deep into the topic, for that I'm going to send you over to this other video by Kevin The Basic Filmmaker.
He's done an excellent job of putting together a very comprehensive guide about everything you need to know about green screening, but I will give you a couple of quick
tips right here.
First of all, you want to make sure that your background is lit properly.
You may notice that mine is actually not right now.
That's because one, I'm lazy and two, it's because I want to show you what happens if you don't get it perfectly right, and also to see how the yellow box handles a slightly
imperfect green.
Second, make sure you are not wearing anything green.
If you are wearing green stuff that will also get keyed out.
And three, you want to make sure that your subject is also well lit.
And in my case, I've got my two lights here, and I've got a little bit of light coming from the back so that my hair is separated from the background.
Without the light on the top of my head, you can see that now my hair kind of blends more into the background, and if I turn it on, it looks a lot better.
It kind of stands out better from the background.
Again, go check out Kevin's video because he does a much better job of explaining it with a lot more detail.
But now we're going to get into the YoloBox part to actually see how to do this with the YoloBox Pro.
I should also point out that this is a feature that's only available in the Pro version of the YoloBox.
It is not in the original, and I think that's because the CPU in the original just wasn't powerful enough to add that feature.
So we're first going to look at the simple case of how to put yourself on top of a static image in the background.
So once you've plugged in your video sources to the YoloBox and you've got your main camera angle with your main subject that has a flat green background, you're ready to do
the chroma key. The way this works is basically you are going to take one of your HDMI inputs and subtract all of the green, and that will all become transparent.
On the YoloBox itself, there's this little person icon in the top right corner.
Click that and that opens up the chroma keying window.
All you do is you turn on the keying switch, and that's going to start out as its default settings.
Now, as you can see, this is actually pretty good just by default.
You can choose between green or blue.
My screen is green, so I'm going to choose that, obviously.
And then you get two sliders.
You get similarity and smoothness.
These are how you can adjust your key setting in case your screen is not super well lit or if you have other problems with the scene.
If your scene is well lit, the defaults are probably good enough, but you can see what happens as I slide this.
It's going to remove more or less of the green, so I'm going to go ahead and slide this until I can see that there's none of the background left, but it's not taking away some of
my face or shirt.
We'll leave it about there.
Smoothness, you'll see it affects the edges, so I don't want it all the way on the left, and I also don't want it too far on the right.
Otherwise it starts going into my face as well.
So I'll find a spot around the middle that looks good right now.
You can see I'm on top of a transparent background, but for this first one, we're going to go ahead and just choose a background image.
This will open up the media chooser that lets you choose any file on your SD card, only still graphics.
I can just press my main red-green-blue background.
Press done. And now all of a sudden you can see it, it slapped that in the background and it's removed all the green and I'm sitting on top of that layer.
Go ahead and click done.
And now you'll notice that when HDMI 1 is selected, you can see it's putting the background in.
If I choose HDMI 2, That one's not keyed.
And as I switch back and forth, you can see it's switching between the regular camera, this angle, or myself on the main camera with the graphic in the background.
You can key more than one of the cameras at the same time.
However, if it's not at the right angle like this, then it's not really going to work very well.
But I can do this. I can put a background image on this one.
I can click done, and now I can go between my two different angles, and both are using the same key.
Of course, if I wanted to do this for reals, I would probably have two different cameras on two different people and then switch back and forth between the two.
I could even have a different background image on top of each angle, in case you wanted to have two different people in two different settings.
So this is great putting yourself on top of a flat image.
But what if you wanted to put yourself on top of another one of the camera angles coming in through HDMI?
That could be a different camera, like a top down camera, or it could be a computer screen to do a moving background or just sharing slides.
The process for this is a little bit different, so we can go through this step by step.
To start with, I'm going to pick the main camera that I want to remove the green from.
Again, press the little person icon, turn on the keying switch.
I'll leave the defaults for now, since it looks like it's doing pretty well and I'm not going to choose a background image.
This is going to keep this background transparent, which is represented by this checkerboard pattern.
Go ahead and click done.
And now you can see when you choose this camera angle, it's your camera in the background removed and it's just black behind it.
So now we want to put myself on top of a different angle.
In this case, my computer screen, which is plugged into HDMI 3.
So this is going to be a little bit different than the first way we did this.
Think of this little icon in the corner as adjusting the filter for that angle.
Now this camera, HDMI 1, has no background because it's been removed by the chroma keyer.
We need to actually make a new video source.
I'm going to press new video source.
We're going to do picture-in-picture for the main screen.
We're going to choose what we want in the background, which is my computer screen.
For the sub screen, we'll choose HDMI 1, which, as you can see, is already got the transparent background.
When I do that, I'm now picture-in-picture small with the background removed.
You can also choose the size by dragging the scale, and you can also drag it around the screen with your finger.
So I can put myself in the corner, I can be smaller.
I could be full size on top of the computer screen, however you want this to look.
Let's say I want myself down in the corner and a little bit smaller.
Go ahead and click done, and what that does is it saves it as an angle now that you can choose.
So I'm probably not going to ever use the main angle anymore because it's just a black background.
Instead, I'll switch between maybe this angle and then put myself down on top of my computer screen over here or just leave it on this angle the whole time.
One thing to keep in mind is that if your green screen does not cover the entire range of your video, you're going to end up with a little bit of a problem.
Let me go, change my camera, zoom, and I'll show you what I mean.
So I just zoomed out my camera, and now you can see that the edges of my green screen don't go to the edge of the frame anymore.
And that's not going to look good for this angle.
And if you look at what it does to the green screen, we've also got these little black borders now.
So if you want to get rid of those, you actually can.
If you're using the picture in picture, we're going to go ahead and edit the picture in picture.
And you can use this aspect ratio setting to treat it as a way to sort of crop the video in.
For example, I know that there's about a square in the middle here that is solid green.
So if I change the aspect ratio to 1:1, what that should do is crop out the edges.
Now you might notice there's a little bit of a glitch here.
Let's just go ahead and save that.
For some reason, the preview is a little buggy, but now if we look at the end result, the edges are actually gone and you can see it's cropping me, right here is where
it's cropped into a square, so we don't have the edge of that picture visible anymore.
So if you can, it's definitely easiest to frame it so that the green goes all the way and covers your entire picture.
But if not, you can use the aspect ratio setting to crop it in.
And again, once you set up this way, you can switch between your different camera angles and you would just treat the picture in picture as one of the angles that has your scene
already configured. Lastly, I want to do this the other way around and show you how you can use the chroma keyer to add graphics in from your computer or an external software on
top of video in the YoloBox.
For this, I'm going to put my green screen away, since we don't need any more for this demo.
To demonstrate this, I'm going to use a program called H2R Graphics, that's by John Barker from Here to Record.
I'll leave a link down below where you can get this program.
This technique will work with any software you're using on your computer to generate graphics as long as it can output a green background in the back.
The way to make this work is you want to actually take this output window and open this on a second monitor that's plugged in from your computer into the YoloBox.
Your computer will see the YoloBox as a second display, and as long as it's not mirrored, you can use your main computer screen and then have the YoloBox look like a second
monitor. So because I've got my computer plugged into the YoloBox, it looks like it's a second display.
It's my secondary monitor, and I can just open up a new tab here and open up the output window of H2R Graphics.
And that's going to be a bright green screen.
Because I've got in H2R graphics I've got my background set to a green.
So again, make sure you go into the settings here, choose a bright green as your background color, because that's what you want to actually key out for this.
I'm also going to make my Chrome browser full screen, and that way the green takes over the entire screen of the YoloBox.
Now that this is one of the HDMI inputs, I can load in my control window for the H2R graphics in another tab, and as I click one of these things, it'll slide out and you can
see the graphic on the black box.
Again, this will work with any graphics program.
You can do this in OBS, you can generate graphics using Keynote even, you can generate graphics with eCamm Live, anything that can output a full screen window with a green
background and graphics on top of it.
So just like before, we're going to first tap the little icon in the top right corner of the computer screen on the YoloBox.
Turn on the keying switch, and because it is a flat, bright green, it should do a pretty good job of, by default, removing the background.
You can see it's now transparent.
If I needed to, I could adjust that, and I'm not going to put a background image on here.
Go ahead and click done.
It's kind of small, but you can see the graphic there -- pk1.
tv -- and a black background.
So again, I'm not going to switch this camera angle ever.
Instead, what I'm going to do is use my main camera angle, switch between these two and now we're going to reconfigure the picture in picture to be the scene.
Go ahead and add a new video source to a picture in picture.
Select your main screen, which is again is the one that's not being keyed out.
So we'll use the main camera here.
Choose the sub screen, which in this case is the one being keyed out -- the computer screen.
For the scale, you probably want it full size.
That way you're taking advantage of the full space of the computer screen and then don't crop it with the aspect ratio.
Make sure it's at the 16:9.
Go ahead and click done.
And now we've got a new scene here to choose from.
Now we can see I can choose between this camera angle and switch between that and the one that has the graphics over it.
Switch back and forth between these two, or I could even choose one that does not have the graphics over it.
This does bring up one of the limitations with this method, which is that you can only have one picture-in-picture scene created on the YoloBox.
If I try to go add a new video source, you can see that it's now grayed out because I can't add two, which means I can only have the computer graphics overlaid over
one camera angle.
So, for example, I can have this camera angle with no graphics over the top.
This one with graphics, but I'll lose the graphics if I switch camera angles.
And that just is one of the limits with bringing in the graphics this way from outside of the YoloBox.
But the good news is there's plenty of options for generating graphics on the YoloBox itself.
So you only need to do it this way if you have very specialized needs that aren't met by the graphics generators in the YoloBox.
As you can see, it was pretty straightforward to use the chroma key feature in the YoloBox.
The defaults mostly work out of the box, and it is pretty forgiving with a poorly lit background like mine.
In real life, you'll probably want to do a better job than I did at lighting your background, making sure it's evenly lit with no dark spots in the corner.
but it did do a pretty good job even with the poorly lit background in mine.
And by the way, if you're wondering what this stand is, this is a stand that I've designed to hold the YoloBox, and it makes it a lot easier to work with when it's on a desk like
this. Otherwise, it's kind of laying flat and you have to kind of peer over it, but this tips it up nicely and gives you a nice surface to work with.
You can also attach cables to the side to clean up your cable mess a little bit.
There's cold shoe mounts on the back so you can attach things like wireless HDMI receiver or a microphone.
And on the bottom it's actually got an aluminum bar so you could attach a tripod plate to this and attach this onto a tripod.
This is available for sale on my website, pk1.tv.
The link is down below, and yes, we do ship worldwide.
I always feel a little bit weird talking about these stands in these videos because it's not like it's a sponsored video because it is my own product that I designed and sell.
So I guess it's more like merch.
So, yeah, support the channel, buy my stand!
Thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next one.