Hi, I'm Steggy from Elgato, and in this video I'm going to show you how you can chroma key your webcam for video conference calls. Now if you work from home and do a lot of video calling, and especially if you've come across this video, you might be wondering how you can hide your background during these video calls. Whether your background is distracting or maybe things just get a little messy from the aspects of everyday life, or maybe you just want to have a little fun and place yourself in front of fun backgrounds, it's actually pretty easy to do. First you want a green screen. And while any green screen can work for this, the extent to which it works does depend on the quality of lighting, lighting up your green screen, or how flat your green screen is because creases and folds create different shadows which can affect the quality of your chroma key. So for the best results we recommend using Elgato Green Screen which provides an incredibly flat green panel for really great chroma key results. Next, you'll want to light yourself. Now the goal with lighting is one, to make you look good, and two, to minimise shadows on the green screen so that it's removed better by software For the best results we recommend using two lights coming at you from about a 45 degree angle and for the best results we recommend using Elgato Key Light since it offers really great quality lighting, a low-profile mounting system that clamps right onto your desk, and it can easily be controlled by software to get the look that you want. And best yet, because Elgato Key Light is such a soft-casting light you can actually get away with using just one of them for your green screen if you do the setup as shown. Lastly for your webcam, this tutorial does work with a traditional webcam like a Logitech C920, but for the best results, using a real camera with Elgato Cam Link will result in a much better picture with more detail and clarity which will help your software in removing the green screen background. Now some conferencing software has green screen removal built in, like Zoom simply has this checkbox that takes care of things. But perhaps software that you use doesn't have this, so what we're going to show you is a way to do it for free that will work with any app. Now to get things set up, first you'll want to download and install OBS and then next you'll want to download and install OBS virtual camera. Both are free and we have them linked below in the description panel. Next you'll want to add your webcam or Cam Link to OBS by adding a video capture device as shown. Now, right click the source you've added, click filters, and we're going to add a chroma key filter. You should be able to leave most of these sliders alone, but just move this similarity slider until you're happy with how much of the green screen is removed from the video. Once you're done, click close, and now your background is removed. And now you can choose your background. You can choose any kind of image or looping video to be your background, and you can do so by just dragging the file onto your source list, and placing that layer underneath the webcam layer. Just keep in mind if it's a video layer, you'll want to right click the source, click properties and check this box so that the video will loop. Now we want to have what we created to be seen by our video conferencing software. So first, click tools and then virtual camera. Then just click start and then you can X this window out. Now in your conferencing software of choice, go to the section where you set your webcam, and you should see an option called OBS cam. And now you can change your background to anything you want when you're video calling your colleagues, your students, your teachers or whoever. I hope you really have some fun with it. Once again, I'm Steggy from Elgato, and until our next video, good luck and have fun.
