13 STREAMPUNK Tool of the Month
CHROMAKEY FOR THE MASSES DropKey’s Studio in a Bag is a new green screen/chromakey solution that aims to turn your iPhone into a complete TV studio
Words by Neal Romanek
ropKey founder Rockwell Scharer III began to think about the powerful production capabilities inherent to Apple’s
content. The videos will cost $0.99 each and sync directly to the user’s content from the cloud. The company is also developing a streaming feature for Twitch users. “Studio in a Bag is not just an innovation that allows live background replacement,” explains Scharer. “It’s actually the infrastructure of what we think is going to be on television, captured on smart devices, five or ten years into the future. With cloud technology, professionals can create content in the cloud that non- professionals can then use to make their content, sync it to the cloud, use whatever workflows they might subscribe to and then output the finished piece to whichever device they want.” Studio In A Bag has recently won a Silver prize at the 2019 Edison Awards in the category of Media, Visual Communications & Entertainment. The Edison Awards, launched in 1987, honour excellence in new product and service development, marketing, human-centred design, and innovation. Scharer believes the DropKey solution will help democratise content creation and open it up to a lot of first-time video
mobile technology when he had his first iPhone 3G. “I was thinking about American Idol auditions and how the producers could save 50 million bucks by not doing an 11-city tour and instead having contestants send in their auditions taken on iPhones,” Scharer recalls. “When I started thinking more about it, and about how the iPhone could run a perfect chromakey while capturing video, I realised I had something.” After several years, his efforts resulted in the DropKey Studio In A Bag: a portable, inflatable green screen system that also has the ability to swap digital backgrounds in and out of footage from a large library of HD video footage. The system is aimed at small production companies, YouTubers and even hobbyists, and is available soon via the DropKey website for £760 ($999). DropKey is also aiming to offer a complete online marketplace for backgrounds, which will allow purchasers of the system to download video loops that suit their location requirements and
Images: © 2019 dropkey.com
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