Sometimes when you streaming a game, or recording a video to YouTube, It’s best to show your face, however you may want to exclude your background. The best solution for that if you use a green screen, and at the editing process, you delete the green screen and add a new background. But there’s a chance that you haven’t got the required accessories and equipments for that. This is the time when one of the best OBS plugin comes in place, OBS background removal.
With the help of this plugin you don’t need any equipment, or green screen. (Of course you need a webcam.) You can remove easily your background with some clicks. But keep in mind, that it will need some processing power, like CPU or RAM, therefore make sure you have enough for streaming and gaming. In this article, we cover how you can install on Windows, Mac, and Linux, use and modify for the best result.
OBS Background Removal Plugin
You’ll find the plugin at the website of OBS, called OBS Background Removal – Portrait Segmentation or you can find it at Github as well.
The first step is to download the plugin.
The second one is to unzip the files to your OBS Studio folder, default it is C:\Program Files\obs-studio . (On Mac /Applications/OBS.app/Contents/)
After this the installation process is done, you can open up OBS. (If it’s already running please close and reopen the software.)
Setup OBS Background Removal
The next step is to add your webcam, or virtual webcam to the scene, then pick and click on the Filters button.
After that on the effects window, click on the plus sign, and choose the Background Removal filter.
Here you will see many options to finetune the Background Removal plugin.
Let’s take a look at, which option is setting the plugin. Let’s start with the Threshold. With that you can change the mask percent, the area that it can covers. The Contour Filter is about the percentage of the excluded area edges. The next two is about smoothening the harsh edges, in a smooth way.
The Background Color you would like to choose is green, of course, if you want to exclude it later on. Probably you can choose any color.
After that you can pick, which part of your pc, does the plugin use, like CPU, or GPU. It depends on which is better on your computer. Like in a laptop, you should definitely use CPU, however in PC-s, you may use GPU.
The segmentation models, are different methods, for background removal. Give it a try for every one of them, to choose the best.
After that the Calculate mask every X frame, is about how often the plugin should check the picture for changes. You can set higher, like 2 or 3 if you want to save performance from your CPU or GPU. However if you set too high, then there’s a chance that you wouldn’t be in the remaining picture.
In the end you can add a Chroma Keyer effect filter, to exclude overall your background.
I hope this tutorial gives you the solution, if you have any question, do not hesitate to ask them in the comment section.
