I had manyCam for a few years now, and I see the team trying to improve Chroma Key, but it really falls short.
This is a very very important feature, and having a Green Screen behind me with a proper lighting I really really don’t want to fiddle with settings - and even when I do - there’s always something that would go wrong.
Zoom, streamyard (in-browser solution!), OBS, streamlabs and etc have and easy “I have a green screen” - and that’s it - works perfectly, no noise, no trying to find those little spots and etc.
Also, all of the above mentioned solutions consume a lot less of CPU for this. Orders of magnitude less.
I think it’s paramount for the future success of manyCam to have an adequate solution for this. Maybe try ML-trained models instead of algorithms - I don’t know, what we currently have is definitely lacking.
Do I want some random colors to become transparent? No. Do I want to randomly be clicking and “picking” colors? No. I have well-lighted environment with a green screen - and there’s me in front of it - it’s that simple.
I hope that the team would read this message and focus on this. I don’t need new features - I need existing ones to work at their best.
At the moment our focus is on performance and improving Chroma Key and Virtual Backgrounds, which we released about a week ago to get background replacement in the hands of people who don’t have green screens.
We also do have the “Auto” feature which should automatically find the dominant background color and remove it which you can see here:
If possible please send me a direct message with some screenshots/more details and I will look into any issues you’re currently having as we currently have resources dedicated to Virtual Background improvements.
Would add my second to this. I have abandoned using green screen or replace background when using manycam as a virtual cam in Zoom; Zoom’s feature in this department works so much better. I even do “slides” as a virtual background in zoom (as opposed to screen sharing of an app), awkward though it be, because the feature works better than manycam. I’m sure manycam will get there!
You made some great points here. I am a teacher and I need the effects on manycam. Otherwise I would go with the green screen on zoom or even OBS. I haven’t tried the other ones you mentioned but I don’t think they are as strong teaching tools as manycam is. I hope manycam will catch up with its competitors soon. Came here to see if it’s my problem but it seems this is a general shortcoming.
I am so pleased by the diversity of features ManyCam offers for me as a teacher. Yet, I am still waiting for the chroma key function to be refined. Even without using a green screen (with same lighting, webcam and other factors), replacing backgrounds in Zoom proves to be infinitely more stable than chromakey within ManyCam, and does not require me to continuously fiddle with the color picker. It is such a critical feature for being able to maximally use different layers. I look forward to refinement of ManyCam’s chromakey feature for green screen usage.
I imagine a higher quality webcam could also make a difference, along with serious attention to fStops and lighting details as professional photographer/videographers might work with. But for the non-photovideo professional, it would be really helpful to find out out that stable, user-friendly, basic green screen functionality is possible with Manycam for teaching purposes.
Otherwise, thank you for all the refinements and innovations to date available with version 7.7.1.3!
