Netflix Magenta Green Screen: How Netflix’s AI plans may ‘kill’ green screens – Times of India

Well, green screens may soon be a thing of the past, as AI has now come for it. Researchers at Netflix have a replacement for the green screen, the Magenta Green Screen (MGS), a technology that blends in artificial intelligence (AI) to create much more realistic movie effects.
Filmmakers have been compositing actors in front of backgrounds that don’t exist since the beginning of the industry. However, it has always been a complicated process.
The most straightforward way of compositing has been using chroma keying. This technique requires actors to stand in front of a bright-coloured background, typically blue at first and later green, which can be easily detected and replaced with various images, such as a weather map or full-blown superhero battle.
Cut to 2023, Netflix has developed a new technique, Magenta Green Screen, which uses machine learning to make the process easier but requires actors to be lit in a bright magenta colour.
How does Netflix’s Magenta Green Screen works
With the latest technology, filmmakers can capture the colour image of the main actor and a high-quality alpha channel of the background simultaneously without needing a specialised camera or manual keying methods.
The new MGS technique films actors in the foreground against a backdrop of bright green LEDs. They are illuminated with red and blue LED sources, which create a magenta glow against a green background, allowing for easy and effective replacement in real-time to display various video scenes. Thus, a much realistic chroma-keying effect is achieved, even in challenging areas such as transparent bottles and hair.
The technique uses machine learning algorithms to turn magenta-tinted foreground actors into full-colour objects, similar to other recent technological innovations. The AI references previously taken photos of the actors in their natural colours. Despite not operating in real-time scenarios, it efficiently completes its tasks.
The new technique has multiple advantages, including faster and more accurate results. One significant benefit is that it does not restrict what the actor can wear. In the test footage, the actor can be seen wearing a green dress and holding a green glass bottle, and neither of them disappeared when the green background was replaced.