I wanted to test a homemade green screen that I made, so I put my MS Office 2007 CD-holder on it and took a pic with my Cliq XT. Then, I searched Google images for a replacement background, and chose a photo of a beach. I put both pics on my desktop, then went to YouTube to find a tutorial on how to chroma key in Photoshop CS4. Not only did I find a tutorial video (see below) but, with it coming in at 2 minutes and 35 seconds long, I found a very SHORT one at that… and miracle of miracles, it was easy to understand and follow.

Less than ten minutes later, I’d successfully chroma keyed my first photo. Yay, me!

I combined these two photos…

To get this photo…

Why did I do this? I needed to see if my homemade greenscreen would work, because I’m going to start video blogging again and this time I wanted to have different backdrops behind me to liven things up a bit, at least visually, anyway. I haven’t done a vlog in several months. I hadn’t been feeling well (fibro flare), and I also had to try to find a new place after I decided not to renew my lease in Sandy Springs. By the way, I love living in Midtown!

I’ll be doing a full write up, including pics, of how I made my greenscreen in the next few days. So, stay tuned! In the meantime, if you want to learn how to chroma key using Photoshop CS4, here’s the tutorial video I watched.

Yes, folks, you read that right. I have a little sumthin sumthin going on for Mr. Toriano Adaryll Jackson, aka Tito Jackson. I think I mentioned it in my review of The Jacksons: A Family Dynasty.

Well, I also did a video blog reviewing the show, but decided to only upload the part where I talked about Tito. This video has been up on YouTube for a few weeks now (as have a few other videos), but I’m just getting around to posting it on this blog. Check it out:

For this tutorial, I’m going to assume that you readers have no money to spend on video editing software, and will be using the software that came free with your computers.

Video Formats
The two most popular video formats are .MOV and .WMV. The .MOV format is native to Mac computers, and iMovie will allow you to encode your video to HD. The .WMV format is native to Windows computers, and Windows Live Movie Maker (Windows 7) or Windows Movie Maker (for XP/Vista) will allow you to encode your video to HD.

YouTube prefers the .MOV format because it’s smaller, but accepts .WMV and some others. The quality of HD in both formats is great. The only time it wouldn’t be is if your camcorder or webcam takes crappy video. You have to put good quality in to get good quality out.

Method
Because I have a PC and not a Mac (sobs loudly ), I used Windows Live Movie Maker to encode/render an example video I made just for this tutorial. The final product is below. But, to show you how I did it, I used a screen recording program to record my steps and my vocal instructions. Because the tutorial video is pretty large, and just under 10 minutes long, I opted for encoding it in the .MOV format over the .WMV format since the former would result in a smaller file size.

Example Video

Tutorial

That’s it! It’s really not a complicated process. If you have any questions, leave a comment or use my contact form to reach me (see the menu bar).

Download the Custom Video File
If you want to get the 960×720p HD custom video profile (.prx file) to use with Windows Live Movie Maker and Windows Movie Maker (for XP/Vista) click this link to download.

How to Install the Custom Video Profile
Unzip the custom file. If you’re asked where to unzip the file, navigate to: C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Photo Gallery\Video Profiles and unzip it there. Start WLMM or WMM and it should be listed in the Save Move settings with the other profiles OR in another section called Custom Profiles (or something like that, I forget). Viola! That’s it. Happy videomaking!

Deuces!