- published: 16 Mar 2012
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Chroma key compositing, or chroma keying, is a special effects / post-production technique for compositing (layering) two images or video streams together, used heavily in many fields to remove a background from the subject of a photo or video - particularly the newscasting, motion picture and videogame industries. A color range in the top layer is made transparent, revealing another image behind. The chroma keying technique is commonly used in video production and post-production. This technique is also referred to as color keying, colour-separation overlay (CSO; primarily by the BBC), or by various terms for specific color-related variants such as green screen, and blue screen - chroma keying can be done with backgrounds of any color that are uniform and distinct, but green and blue backgrounds are more commonly used because they differ most distinctly in hue from most human skin colors and no part of the subject being filmed or photographed may duplicate a color used in the background. It is commonly used for weather forecast broadcasts, wherein the news presenter appears to be standing in front of a large map during live television newscasts, though in actuality it is a large blue or green background. When using a blue screen, different weather maps are added on the parts of the image where the color is blue. If the news presenter wears blue clothes, his clothes will also be replaced with the background video. A complementary system is used for green screens. Chroma keying is also used in the entertainment industry for special effects in movies and videogames. The advanced state of the technology and much commercially available computer software, such as Pinnacle Studio, Adobe Premiere, and dozens of other computer programs, makes it possible and relatively easy for the average home computer user to create videos using the "chromakey" function and easily affordable greenscreen or bluescreen kits.
Chroma Key is the name under which ex-Dream Theater keyboardist Kevin Moore records. Although primarily a solo project, several other musicians have recorded as part of Chroma Key such as bassist Joey Vera, drummer Mark Zonder, and guitarist Jason Anderson.
Chroma Key's music is a mix of psychedelia, electronica and ambient, with detailed keyboard sounds and a slightly dark mood.
After leaving Dream Theater in 1994, Moore relocated to Santa Fe, New Mexico where much of the first album, 1998's Dead Air for Radios was written. 2000's You Go Now was written and recorded in Los Angeles, right before another move to Costa Rica, where Moore lived for 3 years. In Costa Rica, he began writing and recording ideas for a new Chroma Key album, during the day producing a bi-weekly, activist, musical radio program for Radio for Peace International, a short wave station based in San José. Moore released a compilation of the program—a mix of original music and politically volatile spoken word recordings—as a downloadable album on his official site as Memory Hole 1. Graveyard Mountain Home was recorded in Istanbul, Turkey.