Changing the background in video chat

On July 14, 1995, the movie “ Under Siege 2: Dark Territory ” was released on the screens (in Russian box office, “ Capture 2: Dark Territory ”). One of the characters in this film - the evil computer genius Travis Dane - made a video of his face against a changed background so that the real location of the terrorists could not be established (he used a photograph of the Eiffel Tower in Paris for this purpose).

Fifteen years have passed.

Today you don’t need to be a computer genius to replace the background in your video chat. And in Chatroulette, and in Skype, and in Smotri.com video rooms, many do this. However, the more I see such tricks, the more often I see the name of the WebcamMax program on top of them . Generally,this is not surprising: this program is paid , and in the demo version a non-disconnectable “banner” is placed over the video. But why can't video chat lovers find and use a free analogue of it? I am a hater of banner advertising, so I would like all these people to use other software.

I turn right away through Habrahabr to openly recommend ManyCam to everyone - a good program, freeware, which has sufficient capabilities to replace the background during video chat with any photo or moving video from a file. It is available not only for Windows, but also for Mac.

When filmmakers mount modern films on a computer, they also massively replace the background, and for this they need a special one-color, one-color screen of an unnatural blue or light green color on the set (it is also called “chromakey”, from the English  chromakey) . However, in the video chat, unlike the movie, the shooting is carried out by a stationary video camera, so (judging by the ManyCam manual ) it is enough to give a command to the computer, and to get out of the camera’s field of view so that the computer captures an arbitrary genuine background of the video chat and could replace it in the future on any other desired.