Chroma key without a green screen: AI does the keying
No watermark on the free export. Transparent WebM, GIF or green screen, straight out — free exports go up to 1920 px.
Your clip is deleted the moment the cutout is sent back. Want a longer video or another output format? The full tool is on the home page.
Chroma key without a green screen: upload a clip of up to 90 seconds and you get a green screen video back for free, keyed by AI instead of by a green cloth — no account, no watermark.
✂ Green-screen my video, freeHow it works
- Upload your clip. Drag an MP4, MOV, WebM, MKV or AVI onto the tool, or click the box and pick one. A free clip can be up to 90 seconds long and up to 2,000 MB; it goes to computers we operate ourselves and nowhere else.
- The background is removed for you. There is nothing to point at and no colour to choose. The tool works out where you stop and the room begins in every frame, and remembers what it found in the frame before, so the edge stays steady while you move.
- Download the file your editor opens. A green-screen MP4 on chroma green 0x00B140, a transparent WebM, and the alpha matte as a black-and-white video. Your original sound stays in.
To make video green screen output you only need one upload, since the AI works out the subject automatically with no cloth required. Longer sessions work too: film a handful of short takes and this tool turns each into green screen clips you can cut together afterwards. Use the export as a plain green screen for video background work in any timeline that supports chroma key. A green screen high quality export tops out at 1920 px free, or up to 3840 px on the paid pass.
Chroma key vs. AI matting: what actually happens
Both end up in the same place — your background gone — but they look at completely different things, and that is why one needs a cloth and the other does not.
A chroma key removes one colour. You hang up an evenly lit green cloth, film in front of it, and tell the software: everything that is this green is not part of the picture. The software never sees a person. It sees pixels that match a colour and pixels that do not. That is why it is fast, why it sits in every editor, and why it falls apart the moment the cloth is creased, shadowed, or someone wears a green shirt.
AI matting looks at the subject instead. It works out where you stop and the room begins, frame by frame, whatever happens to be behind you: a kitchen, a bookcase, a car park. No cloth, no lighting rig, no colour to pick. That is what this page does, and it is why "chroma key without a green screen" is not a contradiction — the green arrives afterwards, painted in digitally, and only if you want it.
Which one is better depends on the shot, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise:
- Hair. A well-lit real green screen still wins on fine, flyaway strands. Matting gives you the shape of the hair rather than every separate strand. Tied-back hair or a hat comes out noticeably cleaner than loose curls in front of a busy wall.
- Glass and anything see-through. Spectacles, a wine glass, a plastic bottle. Both methods struggle here. A chroma key lets the green shine through the glass and tints it green; matting usually makes the glass solid or drops it altogether. Neither one hands you properly transparent glass.
- Fast movement. A hand thrown across the frame is already blurred in the recording, and that blur is half you and half the room. No method can unmix it, so expect a harder edge on the fastest few frames. Filming at a higher shutter speed helps more than any setting here.
- A background the same colour as you. A normal room is fine, but a grey jumper against a grey wall gives the tool very little to go on. One step away from the wall, or a lamp aimed at yourself, does more than any slider.
The short version: if you already own a green screen and light it properly, keep using it for hair-heavy shots. If you do not own one, matting gets you a usable clip out of the room you are sitting in right now.
Make a green screen video without owning one
Green-screen effects used to require a physical green backdrop, even lighting and careful setup. Now the tool does the keying for you: upload a clip of yourself (filmed in your room, outside, anywhere) and VideoBGNinja returns the same clip with your background replaced by perfect chroma green. Drop it into CapCut, TikTok, Premiere, Resolve or After Effects and key it out like real green-screen footage.
That is the whole trick: you never buy, hang, iron or light a cloth. The green is added afterwards as one exact value, so the green screen video you download is flatter and easier to key than most people manage with a real backdrop at home. What you do still control is the recording — a step away from the wall and a lamp pointed at your face buy you more edge quality than any setting on this page.
Making green screen videos from ordinary footage is the whole job of this page: you upload, the tool runs one background pass and adds chroma green 0x00B140 behind the person. It exports up to 1920 px free, so a 1080p green screen is covered without a pass. If you wanted to add photo backgrounds to a still image instead, BGNinja's background remover handles stills with its own colour picker. And if you want the background gone outright, with no green added (you can add background images later in your editor), take the transparent WebM or see removing a background from video online. Both pages share one engine, a video bg remover on our own GPU, with the same bg remover video limits: 10 clips a day, 90 seconds each. If you came for a video background remover free of the green, the main tool is the same video background remover online free of charge, but it hands you transparency instead; a bg video remover that adds green is simply the other half of the same job.
None of this costs anything to try. Free green screen effects often come with a catch, but here the free green screen export is up to 90 seconds and 2,000 MB per clip, 10 clips a day, with no watermark and no trial. Every upload gives the same flat chroma-green backdrop, so free green screen video backgrounds take one upload and no lighting kit, and getting a green screen free of charge needs no purchase or rental.
A vertical green screen export comes out at whatever aspect ratio you uploaded, so a phone-shot clip for TikTok or Reels stays vertical the whole way through. Shooting green screen vertical footage on a phone needs nothing extra: upload the clip and the aspect ratio carries straight through untouched. One uploaded take becomes a full green screen scene that's ready for any background you drop in behind the subject. Run a handful of clips through the tool and you get back a set of green screen scenes ready to cut together in any order.
What you get
One upload, three files back — plus a short transparent GIF as a bonus — so you can take whichever one your editor actually opens:
- A green-screen MP4 on chroma green 0x00B140, the shade every chroma-key filter is tuned for. It works everywhere, including the phone apps that refuse transparency.
- A transparent WebM (VP9 with a real alpha channel) for anything that reads it: OBS, web pages and browsers. Premiere Pro, After Effects, Final Cut and DaVinci Resolve do not import a transparent WebM without a plug-in, so use the green MP4 there.
- The alpha matte as a plain black-and-white video, if you would rather build the composite yourself.
Your original audio stays in. Free exports come back at up to 1920 px on the longest side, from clips of up to 90 seconds and 2,000 MB. The free monthly pass for e-mail subscribers raises that to 4 minutes, 4,000 MB and 2560 px; the paid pass goes to 3840 px, adds a ProRes 4444 MOV — the transparent file Premiere and Resolve do open — and puts your job at the front of the queue. One clip is handled at a time per visitor, and you get 10 clips a day, resetting at midnight.
Plenty of visitors just want to turn video into green screen output without learning a new tool: upload, wait, download. Converting video to green screen this way skips the cloth, the lighting rig and the tripod. What comes back is a plain green video file with flat chroma green across every frame, which works as a green bg video in any chroma-key plugin and as green screen video backgrounds for whatever you build next, from a tutorial to a full interview.
一 From clip to clean cut-out
The tool tracks the person through the whole clip with temporal memory, so edges stay stable while you move. You get an MP4 on chroma green (0x00B140, the exact green every editor's chroma-key filter expects), plus a transparent WebM and an alpha matte as bonuses. Original audio stays in.
二 Why green screen instead of transparent?
Not every app supports transparent video. TikTok, CapCut mobile, Instagram edits and most phone editors don't accept alpha channels, but they all have a chroma-key / green-screen effect. A green-screen MP4 is the universal currency of background replacement.
三 Keying the green out in CapCut, TikTok & Premiere
The green-screen MP4 uses a clean, uniform chroma green (0x00B140), so keying it out is usually a one-click job: no lighting artefacts to fight. Here's where to look in the apps people actually use:
- CapCut (desktop): select the clip → Cutout → Chroma Key, pick the green with the eyedropper, then nudge Intensity/Shadow until the edges are clean.
- TikTok & CapCut mobile: use the built-in green screen effect: drop your background photo or video first, then add the green-screen clip on top and the app keys it automatically.
- Premiere Pro: apply the Ultra Key effect, sample the green with the eyedropper (it should land on 0x00B140), then fine-tune Matte Generation if hair edges look soft.
- DaVinci Resolve: use the 3D Keyer on the Color page, qualify the green, and feed the key into Fusion or a Power Window for compositing.
All four apps rely on the same idea as a physical green screen: replace one colour with transparency. Curious how that compares to AI matting when there's no backdrop at all? See our green screen vs AI matting comparison.
四 Why this green keys cleaner than a real green screen
This is the part that surprises people who've done chroma key the physical way. Every problem a real green screen has comes from it being a physical object in a room:
- It's lit unevenly, so "green" is a range of greens. Your key has to be tolerant enough to catch all of them — which means it also catches things you wanted to keep.
- Fabric wrinkles and creases, and every crease is a slightly different shade.
- It spills: green light bounces off the backdrop onto the back of a neck, shoulders and hair. So you need spill suppression to remove green from a person who was never green.
- Your subject casts a shadow on it, and shadowed green is another colour again.
The MP4 you get here has none of that, because the green was never in a room. It's composited digitally as one exact value — 0x00B140, flat across the whole frame, in every frame. No gradient, no crease, no shadow, no spill, because the light in your original clip never touched it. A key that needs careful tuning on real footage becomes close to trivial: sample the green, keep the tolerance narrow, done. Narrow is the counterintuitive bit — on real footage you widen tolerance to catch uneven green, and widening is what eats hair and edges. Here you never have to.
The honest trade-off: the edge came from the matting model, not from the key. Keying green can't recover a strand of hair the model already simplified. If your editor supports it, the transparent WebM or the alpha matte skips the round trip through a colour and is a shade cleaner. Green exists for compatibility — and for that it's excellent.
五When the key still looks wrong
Four things go wrong, and each has a different cause than people assume.
A green rim around the subject. On real footage that's spill, and you'd reach for spill suppression. Here it isn't spill — it's the matte edge sitting half a pixel wide, blending subject and background. Raising the key tolerance makes it worse by eating into the edge. Instead choke or shrink the matte inward by a pixel (Ultra Key's Choke, Resolve's Matte Shrink), or switch to the alpha matte and nudge it there.
Holes in the subject. Almost always green in the shot: a green shirt, a green logo, a plant behind the shoulder that survived matting. Digital green has the same weakness as physical green — don't wear the colour you're keying. If you're stuck with the footage, key with a narrow tolerance and mask the hole by hand, or use the WebM instead so no colour is involved at all.
Soft or chewed hair. That's the matte, not the key. Better lighting on the subject at record time is the only real fix; a bit of contrast between hair and the original background gives the model something to find.
It looked fine, then looked wrong. Check the composite over a bright background as well as a dark one. A faint green or dark rim is invisible against dark grey and obvious against white, and it's far easier to fix while the project's still open.
Two habits that matter more than any setting: don't sharpen or denoise before keying — both move edge pixels around, which is exactly what the key measures — and if you'd rather not open an editor at all, ffmpeg keys it in one line:
ffmpeg -i bg.mp4 -i green.mp4 -filter_complex "[1:v]colorkey=0x00B140:0.10:0.05[fg];[0:v][fg]overlay" out.mp4Use it in OBS, CapCut, Premiere, Zoom
Loading the file is where most people get stuck, so here is one sentence per program:
- OBS Studio: add the transparent WebM as a Media Source and it sits over your scene with no keying at all — the step-by-step is in our OBS stream overlay guide.
- CapCut: put your new background on the first track, the green-screen MP4 on the track above it, then Cutout → Chroma Key and pick the green with the eyedropper.
- Premiere Pro: drop the green-screen MP4 above your background, apply Ultra Key and sample the green; the transparent WebM will not import, so use the MP4 or the ProRes MOV.
- Zoom, Meet and Teams: these want a finished video as a virtual background rather than a cut-out, so composite first and hand them the result — see virtual background video.
- A laptop-camera recording: if the clip came straight off your webcam, start at webcam background remover instead.
As a web green screen tool it needs no plugin or install — just upload from a browser tab, and the AI matting runs on our own GPU. Think of it as a video green screen maker that skips the cloth entirely, since the AI keys the subject out and paints in chroma green automatically. Every export already matches the filter green screen editors default to, so keying it out usually takes one click.
Would you rather have no colour in the file at all? Transparent video explains the alpha route, and video to transparent WebM covers that format itself.
None of the apps above is an online green screen video editor with a full timeline, and neither is this page: it isn't a green screen editor, it only adds the green. To green screen a video, or add green screen to video clips you already have, this online green screen tool is the first step, free, with no watermark and no account; the editing comes after, in CapCut, Premiere or Resolve.
六Questions
Is it really free?
Yes: no account, no watermark and no trial, within 10 clips a day. The site runs on ads and an optional paid pass, and the tool runs on our own hardware.
What are the limits?
Free: up to 90 seconds and 2,000 MB per clip, exported at up to 1920 px on the longest side. The free monthly pass for e-mail subscribers gives 4 minutes, 4,000 MB and 2560 px; the paid pass gives 4 minutes, 4,000 MB, 3840 px, a ProRes 4444 MOV and priority in the queue. One clip is handled at a time per visitor, and you get 10 clips a day, resetting at midnight. Trim longer videos into parts first.
Is my video kept?
No, your upload is deleted right after processing and results are wiped within 45 minutes. See the privacy policy.
Which green does it use?
Chroma green 0x00B140, the standard shade chroma-key filters are tuned for. Set your keyer to that colour and the background vanishes cleanly.
What's the difference between a "green screen bg" and green screen removal?
Two different steps. A green screen bg, the same chroma-green backdrop as a green screen background, is what this tool adds to your clip. Green screen removal is the next step, in your editor: CapCut, Premiere or Resolve key it out in a click, as described above. If you want to remove green screen from video you already shot, key it in your editor, or upload it here and take the transparent WebM.
Why green and not black, and does it work on a single picture?
Green, because almost every editor's chroma-key filter is tuned for green by default; a green screen black or green screen black screen setup is much harder to separate from dark hair and shadows. And this tool is built for video, not a single green screen image or picture green screen shot. To green screen a photo, use BGNinja: it cuts out stills the same way and lets you pick green, or any colour, as the new backdrop.
Do I need a green screen at all?
No, and that is the whole point of this page. Film in your kitchen, at your desk or outside, and the tool works out where you stop and the room begins. A real green screen is optional here, not a requirement.
Can I still use a real green screen with this?
Yes, and on shots with a lot of loose hair it is worth doing. Film in front of your lit green cloth as usual and upload that clip; you get back a digitally flat green that keys more cleanly than the cloth ever did. You are not choosing one method over the other — you are giving the tool an easier picture to read.
What is chroma key?
Chroma key is the trick of telling software "this one colour is not part of the picture, make it see-through". Green is the usual choice because skin contains almost none of it. It is the effect behind every weather forecast, and in editors it hides under names like Chroma Key, Ultra Key or 3D Keyer.
Why does hair look rough at the edges?
Because the cut-out is worked out from the picture itself, and fine strands are only a couple of pixels wide with the room showing through them. You get the shape of the hair rather than every strand, and it shows most on loose curls in front of a busy background. More light on your hair and a step away from the wall help; keying the green harder does not, because that eats into the edge.
How long can the clip be?
90 seconds per clip on the free tier, and up to 2,000 MB. Both passes raise that to 4 minutes and 4,000 MB. Longer than that: cut the video into parts, run them one after another and join them again in your editor.
Can I add a custom background after the green screen is keyed out?
Yes — that is the intended next step. Key out the green in CapCut, Premiere, Resolve or any editor that supports chroma key, then drop your scene behind the subject. The green is a standard chroma green that every editor's keyer is already tuned to.
Does it work for TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels?
Yes — upload your clip, get back a green-screen version, then take that into CapCut or the TikTok creator tools and key the green out against your background. The output is a standard MP4, so it fits any short-form platform.
Can I use this to get a virtual background for Zoom or Microsoft Teams?
Not directly — Zoom and Teams apply their own virtual background to a live camera feed and don't accept pre-processed video as camera input (Zoom does take an MP4 or MOV file as the background itself). This tool is for recorded clips, not live video. For a recorded presentation or tutorial, it works well.
What is a blue screen and is it different from a green screen?
The technique is identical — blue was the standard before green took over. The difference is practical: green is the furthest colour from most human skin tones, so it spills less onto the subject. Blue is still used in film when the subject is wearing green or when shooting under tungsten lights. For most home and creator use, green is the better starting point. People still search blue screen and green screen together because the technique is the same one, just a different colour cloth.
Does the green screen technique work if animals or pets are in the video?
Not reliably. The model is built to find people, so a pet on its own may come back partly cut out or missing, and a clip with nobody in it can come back almost empty. Where fur does come through, it shows the same rough edge as loose hair.
What video resolution works best with green screen keying?
1080p gives the keyer more pixels at the edges than 720p, and below 720p fine hair can look blocky after keying. Free exports go up to 1920 px on the longest side, so a 4K source comes back scaled down to that; 3840 px (4K) output needs the paid pass.
Can I apply a green screen to stock footage from another camera?
Yes, as long as the clip has a person in it. The stock clip never had a green screen, so the tool mattes the person out and paints chroma green 0x00B140 in behind them: you get a clip your editor can key as if it had been filmed on a cloth. Fast movement or a busy background shows more edge artefacts, which a second pass in your editor's keyer usually cleans up.
Can I edit green screen video, or just generate the green background?
This page only does the second half: it's the green screen generator step, adding the chroma-green background to your subject. To edit green screen video afterwards — swap in a scene, add graphics — you still key it out in CapCut, Premiere or Resolve as covered above; there's no built-in editor here, on purpose, so the export stays a plain file any editor can open. The same goes for any video software with green screen support: it's only needed for the keying step, and video editing green screen work, swapping in your real scene, happens there.
Is there a video green screen effect app, or does it work in a browser?
Browser only, no app needed. Upload a clip and this page adds the green screen effect on our server, free up to 1920 px, with nothing installed on your phone or computer. For green screen video AI is the whole method: a model works out subject from background frame by frame, no cloth involved.
Is there a green screen video editor built into this page?
No, there's no timeline editor here. This page makes the green-screen MP4 (up to 1920 px free) and stops there; keying and editing happen in a green screen video editing app such as CapCut or Premiere. If you want a video editor online, our video editor free on this site trims, crops and merges clips, but it has no chroma key.
Can I see examples of what a finished frame looks like?
The comparison figures above show finished frames: a subject keyed against chroma green 0x00B140, the same shade every editor's keyer expects. There's no separate gallery. Your own clip makes the best green screen example, and of all green screen examples it's the one that tells you most, since the same flat green comes back every time.
Can I go from a green screen video to transparent instead?
Yes — a green screen video to transparent request is exactly what the transparent WebM export covers: skip the colour entirely and get real alpha transparency instead, covered on the transparent video page.
Is there a plain green screen video download, and does "remover" mean something different here?
A green screen video download is the set of files you get after the upload: the green-screen MP4, the transparent WebM, the alpha matte and a short transparent GIF, all free. A green screen video remover usually means the opposite job, stripping the background out instead of adding green, which is the background-removal tool linked above. Clips go through one at a time.
Can I get a white background instead of green?
Yes, it's a simple green screen to white background swap once you're editing: key out the chroma green and drop in plain white, or lay the transparent WebM over a white layer in software that reads WebM alpha.
Does this work in Chrome, and is there a green screen gif?
Yes, it works in Chrome and every other modern browser, so green screen chrome support needs nothing special. As for a green screen gif: every upload also comes with a short transparent GIF of the first 10 seconds, so instead of green you get real see-through pixels with no colour to key out.
What is a green screen, and why green specifically?
A plain, evenly lit backdrop that a chroma-key filter can swap for anything else, the trick behind weather forecasts and films. So what is a green screen, in one line: a colour the software is told to ignore. Green is used because it's the colour furthest from most human skin, which is why editors default their green screen filters to it.
Does this work for filming green screen scenes for movies, or does that need a studio?
No studio needed. Movies green screen work traditionally means lighting a real cloth evenly, and to film green screen footage that way at home you'd need the same gear and space. Here the background video green screen result comes from AI matting an ordinary clip, so video backdrops for green screen are optional. In that sense your videos are green screen material the moment you upload them.
Is this a greenscreen video maker, or do I need a greenscreen generator first?
It's both in one step. You don't film against a cloth first; you upload an ordinary clip, and the tool cuts the person out and paints the green in behind them. A plain wall, a kitchen or a busy street works, and if you already shot against green, that's fine too.
As a green screen overlay alternative, the transparent WebM drops onto a background clip with no keying in software that reads WebM alpha, such as OBS or a web page. Everywhere else, key the green MP4 or use the alpha matte as a track matte on your original footage.
As a green screen creator it works the other way round from most: instead of editing an existing green-screen clip, it generates one from ordinary footage — the flat, even green comes from the AI, not a cloth.
Green screen on YouTube usually means the Shorts camera's own effect, which puts a background behind you while you record. This page works on footage you already have: upload the clip and you get a keyed green-screen file to use anywhere, YouTube included.
A banner green screen, the roll-up cloth backdrop streamers buy, is the exact prop this page replaces. Setting one up as a green screen banner behind a desk means clamps, a stand and enough room to hang it without shadows; film anywhere with decent light instead and the AI works out the edges without one.
How to make a green screen video without owning any equipment: film normally, upload the clip here, and the AI keys a flat, even green in behind your subject automatically.
Remove green screen video usually means one of two things: turning real green-screen footage transparent, which the WebM export on this page already does, or pulling a background out of ordinary footage that was never filmed on green — that's the sibling background-removal tool linked above.
More free ninja tools: remove photo backgrounds · make a transparent video · transcribe your video
By Sam Ridder — I build and run VideoBGNinja on my own hardware, on my own. Who I am.
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