How to Use a Green Screen in OBS Studio Live Streams?

A green screen provides streamers with multiple ways to showcase their creativity. They can incorporate a green screen in their streaming kit and make their videos more entertaining and engaging. At the same time, there are many practical use cases of a green screen for gamers, PowerPoint presenters, video creators, and artists. At its core, the technology makes the main character of the video independent of the background and allows them to replace it with anything else they would like. OBS Studio is a streaming software that enables you to use a green screen in your streams easily and efficiently.

How Does the Green Screen Feature Work?

In the world of streaming, using a green screen simply means removing the background of your streams or replacing it with anything imaginable. For example, you might have seen the figure of a streamer appearing over their gameplay. They make it happen using a green screen. It is also possible to replace the gameplay with a movie, an advertisement, or even a still image. This feature is primarily useful for the streamers who do not want the background of their everyday lives to contribute to their streams and set up an appealing, more relative theme instead. Think of a streamer who needs to go live, and they do not have sufficient time to clean their room. In such a situation, they can replace the background of the video using a green screen and OBS Studio.

What Are the Advantages of Using a Screen?

The green screen feature has many advantages for live streamers. Let’s have a look at a few of them:

It makes you independent of your natural recorded environment.

With a green screen setup, you can go live from any location and have the same visuals as your stream’s background. You get the freedom to choose the background of your choice for your streams.

You can change the background anytime while live streaming.

You do not have to stick to a single background throughout your entire live streaming session. You can change your background theme according to the topic or script of your live streams. To make your content more interesting and engaging, you can even choose to change the background according to your viewers’ responses.

You Can convert your background into a space for advertisements.

If you are live streaming to sell something or want to rent out the space for promotions and ads, you can use the stream’s background to display advertisements, product catalogs, and call to action, thereby increasing sales to grow your business.

How to Set Up OBS Studio for a Green Screen?

Once you have got your green screen, you need to set up your OBS Studio to use it.

• Open OBS Studio and add your webcam as a video source.
• Right-click on the video source option and select Filter.
• Click on the + sign below the effect filters box.
• Select Chroma key.
• Give the layer a name and fine-tune the values as required.

What Are the Challenges Involved in Using a Green Screen?

A green screen can be very beneficial for a streamer to stand out and engage their audience. However, there are a few things you need to know before getting your hands on a green screen.

• Wearing the color of your green screen can distort your streams, hence it shall be avoided. We have set up OBS Studio to remove the color of your background from your presentation, which means you may appear as a floating head in your streams if you wear the same color.
• If you are using a webcam with Auto White Balance (AWB) enabled, it may interfere with the green screen feature. AWB tries to balance out the white in the footage and may change the color of your green screen. It is a good idea to disable it beforehand.
• Using a green screen in OBS is very intensive on your CPU and can lead to frozen images or dropped frames. Lagging video frames can make your viewers’ experience unpleasant. So, if implementing a green screen puts your system in a lurch, it is wise to think about hosting your OBS Studio on a cloud server instead of your local computer.

Apps4Rent Can Host OBS Studio in the Cloud to Support the Green Screen Feature

Installing and configuring your OBS Studio on a cloud server rather than on-premises helps it to scale as required and deliver excellent performance. Hosted OBS enables you to utilize the whole range of its features effortlessly. Apps4Rent offers premium OBS hosting services at an affordable cost, helping you live stream from anywhere, using any device. We use NVIDIA GPU to support your streams rich in graphics. Contact our hosting expert or support executives available 24/7 via phone, chat, and email for hosting plan inquiries.