Magenta Green Screen: Netflix is ​​revolutionizing green screen technology

Netflix has developed a new technology and combines green screen, magenta light and artificial intelligence. Filmmakers can now produce realistic effects in real time and with less glitches. The backgrounds.

What a green screen is, meanwhile also people who do not work in the film business know. Producers install a green background during filming, which can be hidden in post-production using so-called alpha keying.

Netflix has now developed this technique further and invented a new method. It’s called Magenta Greenscreen and uses machine learning, among other things, to do some of the work in the editing room. The company recently presented how the new technology works in a essay explained.

Netflix uses green screen and magenta light for new technology

In the paper, Netflix describes the method as a “novel machine learning-assisted matting technique for capturing a foreground actor’s color image and a simultaneous high-quality alpha channel without requiring a dedicated camera or manual keying techniques.”

Simply put, the actors are filmed against a background of bright green LEDs, while simultaneously being front-lit with red and blue LEDs. Together this gives a magenta glow.

Filmmakers can see real-time visual effects

Digital cameras capture an individual red, green, and blue value for each captured pixel. With this, magenta green screen achieves the effectthat a green channel only picks up the background, while the foreground appears black. A red-blue channel, on the other hand, only captures the foreground, while the background appears black.

Together these channels create the magenta and green appearance. Editors can then very easily separate these two areas and replace the green channel in real time. This allows you to show the actors realistically in front of a different background during the shoot.

Magenta green screen: Artificial intelligence colors actors back to normal

The problem with the method: Due to the magenta light, the actors initially appear in a mixture of red and blue. To solve this, the Netflix researchers rely on artificial intelligence.

However, in post-production, the editors can use a colorization machine learning technique to recover the foreground green channel. For this, the coloring model is trained with a sample frequency of the performers, which was illuminated by white light. The test shot in normal lighting is therefore used as a reference.

Although the previous green screen technology has already made fantastic productions possible in the past, there were occasional glitches. Green clothing and also transparent or very fine objects such as strands of hair occasionally caused problems in post-processing.

In order to get settings perfect, trained employees sometimes spent hours adjusting the settings or editing a recording. Meanwhile, the new technology delivers very precise matte effects without interference from the artefacts mentioned.

Netflix magenta green screen is met with skepticism among film professionals

Some experts in the film industry are quite skeptical about magenta green screens. Drew Lahat of video production company Geiger told the Post in California New Scientistthat while the industry always welcomes new methods, the technique involves many complex steps that may not yet be appropriate for the fast-paced nature of film and television shooting.

And actors could also go on the barricades. In the past, many have complained that working in front of a green screen is unnatural. Being illuminated by a magenta light at the same time should pose a double challenge.

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