How to Remove the Background in Blender

Removing a background in Blender usually means one of two jobs. The first is rendering a 3D scene so the background comes out transparent. The second is cutting a person or object out of filmed footage, typically a green or blue screen recording, using the compositor's keying tools. Blender handles both offline: you render and then export. It is not a live tool. If you want to replace your background during a video call, use the background feature in your conferencing app or in virtual camera software instead of Blender.

A note on sources: no version-specific documentation or test results were supplied for this guide. The menu names below follow the layout of recent Blender releases and may differ in your version. Check them against the official manual for the release you have installed.

The short answer

• For a 3D render, turn on the transparent film option in Render Properties and save to a format that keeps an alpha channel, such as PNG set to RGBA.
• For filmed footage, load the clip into the compositor and use a keying node to turn the screen colour into transparency. The Keying node is designed for green and blue screen work.
• For footage without a uniform screen colour, the core Blender workflow is manual masking, also called rotoscoping. No built-in automatic subject detection is confirmed for current releases in the material available here.

Making a 3D render's background transparent

• 1. Open the Properties editor and go to the Render Properties tab.
• 2. Expand the Film panel and enable Transparent. This option is available in both Cycles and EEVEE.
• 3. Go to the Output Properties tab and pick a file format that supports alpha, such as PNG or OpenEXR.
• 4. Set the colour mode to RGBA. In RGB mode the alpha channel is discarded and the background turns solid again.
• 5. Render the image or animation and save it.

Check: open the saved file in an image viewer or editor that shows transparency. The area behind your objects should appear as a checkerboard or as empty space, not as the world colour. Inside Blender's render window, the background shows as a checkerboard when Transparent is on.

The Transparent option hides the world background in the final image, but the world still lights the scene. If lighting changes when you remove or edit the world, the world was contributing to it, so you may need to add lights.

Removing a green or blue screen from footage

• 1. Switch to the Compositing workspace and enable Use Nodes.
• 2. Add a Movie Clip or Image input node and load your footage.
• 3. Add a Keying node. Connect the footage to its Image input, then use the eyedropper to sample the screen colour into the Key Color field.
• 4. Adjust the node's settings, such as clip levels, despill and edge options, until the subject is solid and the screen is fully transparent.
• 5. Use the matte output, or a Viewer node, to check the black-and-white mask. White areas are kept and black areas are removed.
• 6. To add a new background, combine the keyed result with your background image using an Alpha Over node. Otherwise, send the keyed image straight to the Composite node.
• 7. Render to an alpha-capable format if you want to keep transparency.

Blender also includes simpler keying nodes, such as Chroma Key, Color Key, Luminance Key and Difference Key. These can work on cleaner shots. Uneven lighting, wrinkles in the screen and motion blur make any key harder, and those problems are easier to fix when filming than afterwards. For parts of the frame a key can't separate cleanly, draw a mask in the Movie Clip Editor and combine it with the key using a Mask node.

Keeping the speech audio when you export

If your footage includes someone speaking, the audio needs its own handling. Image sequences such as PNG frames contain no sound. The compositor works on pictures only, so rendering keyed frames leaves the original speech behind.

• Keep the original recording's audio as a separate file. Alternatively, export it from Blender with the Render Audio (mixdown) option.
• To produce a finished video, bring the rendered frames into the Video Sequence Editor together with the audio strip. Make sure the frame rate matches the source, then encode to a video format that carries audio.
• If you need both transparency and sound, check that your chosen video codec supports an alpha channel. Many common delivery codecs do not. If yours doesn't, deliver the image sequence and the audio file separately.

Check: play the final file and watch a moment where the lips are clearly visible, such as a hard consonant. The sound should land with the mouth movement. If it drifts as playback continues, the project frame rate probably does not match the original footage.

Removing the visual background has no effect on background noise in the recording. Fan hum, room echo or keyboard clicks picked up by a webcam or other microphone stay in the audio. Reducing them is a separate audio task, and a cleaner recording space or a closer microphone helps more than any change to the video.