We started with one camera and natural light. No green screen, no LED wall and no studio lighting. The challenge was to take an uninterrupted outdoor shot and see how far we could push it in post.
The final composite came together in Unreal Engine. Getting there meant solving several connected problems: separating the subject, matching the camera, rebuilding the lighting and creating shadows that followed the performance.
The result is in the video above. Here are the decisions that made it work.
Clean up the foreground
We began with BEN2 for background removal. It handled the footage well, but left a white fringe around parts of the subject. Edge extension in Fusion helped clean up that outline before we moved into the final composite.
A fringe is a small defect with a large visual impact. Against a new background, even a thin bright line can make the subject feel detached from the scene.
Just as we finished this video, Photoshop received a background-removal update. We tested it on some of our footage and were impressed enough to make it part of our ongoing roto workflow. The Photoshop background-removal tutorial follows that process in detail.
Relight while preserving facial detail
Our first relighting test did not give us the look we wanted. On this shot, the skin became too smooth and lost some of the facial detail that made the original footage feel real.
We changed the normal-map generation approach and kept more of that detail in the result. It gave us a better foundation for shaping the light inside Unreal.
This is where evaluating the whole image matters. A dramatic light change is only useful if the person still looks like the person we filmed.
Make the shadow follow the subject
There was no usable shadow in the extracted image. With a moving, tracked camera, a flat shadow that looked right from one angle would not be enough.
We built a 3D shadow solution that followed the talent through the shot. Alongside the camera track, it helped ground the subject in the virtual environment instead of leaving the performance floating over a background.
The breakdown shows the result rather than a complete shadow-rig tutorial, but the role is clear: the contact with the environment has to move convincingly with the subject.
Check ghosting in the final render
The final hurdle was ghosting. We had seen a similar issue before, caused by a frame-rate mismatch in the media source. This time, the problem came from low temporal samples.
Increasing the sample count from 16 to 128 removed the ghosting in this render. The tradeoff was longer rendering time. That was worth it for this shot, but it is a setting to test, not a number to apply blindly to every project.
Bring the shot together
The finished shot depends on each part working together. The matte separates the subject, camera tracking matches the virtual camera to the original shot, and relighting and shadows help the subject fit the new environment.
Unreal brings those parts into one composite. Test a short section over the intended background to spot rough edges, mismatched lighting or shadows before rendering the full shot.
This breakdown accompanies our March 27, 2025 demonstration. The settings and results describe that shot.
