News-magazine style interviews . . . the fast and easy way

Royalty-free InstaBackgrounds plates are designed to match the style of interviews that you see on high-end PBS documentaries, such as Frontline, and the best network news magazines such as 60 Minutes, 20/20, and Dateline NBC. No matter what your budget is or what kind of camera you use, now you can give your clients that same level of production quality with virtually no extra effort on your part.

Think about the power and flexibility of being able to shoot an interview anywhere, at anytime, and make it look totally different in post.

Most InstaBackgrounds are not wide shots – or even medium shots – because that’s not how high-end interviews are shot.  The best-looking interviews are usually shot with long focal lengths, wide-open f-stops, and artfully designed lighting to get as much separation between the talent and background as possible.

Out-of-focus, by design

InstaBackground plates are purposely shot out of focus so they look as realistic as possible.  Now you may ask why you can’t just blur-out a background in post?  Well you can, but the bokeh and depth-of-field won’t look as good. There’s just no substitute for shooting a real background, with a real lens, focused as if the talent was actually positioned about 8 to 12 feet from the camera.

Why 4K?

Every InstaBackground 4K image has more than four-times the resolution of 1080P and more than nine-times the resolution of 720P.  So that means that if you’re editing with an HD timeline -- but using a 4K (4096x2160) image for your background -- you can zoom-in and change the scaling of the background, pan the background to adjust the framing, or simply use it full-screen -- all with perfectly pristine image quality --because it's a 4K video clip. Of course, if you still prefer HD (1920x1080), all of our clips are available in that resolution as well.

Shooting interviews against a green screen has many advantages:

1. You won’t be forced to settle for less-than-ideal backgrounds, just because that’s “all there is” at the shooting location.

2. You won’t have to worry about competing with, or being interrupted by, ambient sounds in the background. The beauty of a green screen interview is that you can pretty much set it up anywhere -- an office, conference room, hotel room, living room, basement, garage, etc.

3. You won’t be constrained by the limitations of weather conditions, the time of day, or seasons.

4. You can give all your interviews a consistent look and style -- no matter where or when you shoot them.

5. You can place your talent in locations that might not otherwise be available for shooting.

6. You can choose a background that has windows without worrying about exposure issues – something that might be very difficult in the real world without a lot of extra work and equipment.

7. You can set up and break down a green screen in a matter of minutes, which saves time over choosing a real location, then lighting the background, and dressing the shot with props.

Unlimited image customization options within your NLE

InstaBackgrounds provide maximum versatility and are easy to customize with any NLE’s built-in image adjustment tools. Imagine the power of being able to make infinite adjustments to the background image without ever affecting the talent in the foreground.

An InstaBackground is never "done" until you say it is. You can change the white balance, flip it horizontally to reverse direction, darken, lighten, add more blur, add a vignette around the edges, grade individual elements, add or reduce contrast, change the color saturation, and much more. In addition, because of their high resolution, 4K InstaBackgrounds allow you to change the framing by zooming-in (up to 2x), panning, cropping, and rotating the image without ever affecting the picture quality.