Need to remove black background from your VFX footage? Often with overlay video effects such as snow, fog, glitch and flash fx the files will have black backgrounds. This is due to pre-keyed video formats (which include transparency) having incredibly large file sizes and issues with software compatibility. Sometimes you might have green screen backgrounds, where you would need to use keying effects to create transparency, but in cases where you want to remove a black background the simplest way to achieve this is to use blending modes. Blending modes change the way your effect layer displays over the footage beneath by, in short, only showing the bright or the dark areas depending on the setting. Add or Screen modes will only display the light areas, effectively keying out the blacks. This is useful for VFX overlays which are generally bright elements on dark backgrounds. Conversely, Multiply or Darken blending… read more
