A cool tool for meme makers to play with, Unscreen removes background from videos, GIFs

Chennai: Goodbye green screen, hello Unscreen, says the tagline on Unscreen.com. It’s as simple as that. No more green screen needed while shooting a video to fill in a desired background later. And no need for complex software to edit out background from existing video clips and GIFs that you want to play around with. Just use Unscreen for a free and get an instant cutout.

All you need to do is go to unscreen.com, upload or paste a video or GIF or its url and voila! You get a cutout of the subject with a transparent screen behind, which you can then insert into any preset background offered by the site or use one of your liking.

The Unscreen AI-based web application will most likely appeal to meme makers and social media users who just want to create some fun GIFs or videos. Mostly because currently it can only process 5-second-long videos. But also because, as convenient as it is, it doesn’t give you the most professional output. You might find some edges snipped off or some slightly odd bits stuck in, but for the most part, it gets the job done, and in no time.

What’s so cool about it is that it’s truly automatic. Other than uploading your video or GIF, you have to do nothing. You don’t have to choose paths, select colours, pick pixels or block out portions. Although, it would have been nice to have a few post-unscreen editing options to fine-tune the output.

Formats supported by Unscreen are .mp4, .webm, .ogg and .gif. Processed videos can be downloaded as GIFs, animated PNG or a zip file of individual PNG frames.

To remove background from images, you can use remove.bg, which was developed by the same startup Kaleido that now offers unscreen.