Having a clean white background for 360 product spins is important for many websites where blending product photography seamlessly into the page is a top priority. Instead of manual background removal, we almost always recommend using good lighting along with Arqspin’s iOS or web editing tools to get a white background for your 360’s from the start. But some scenes and objects can be really difficult to get right.

To remove backgrounds in static photography, many people use Photoshop. And there are numerous background removal services, such as Remove The Background and Clipping Magic.  But in video, there are so many frames that these labor intensive techniques are impractical.  In Hollywood, they utilize a technique called “rotoscoping” that will track an object through the video – it’s still a manual process but faster than working on each frame individually.

Recently, our friends at ZBoard made a video they wanted to convert into a 360 product spin, and the seams in the background and the turntable edge were proving difficult to remove.

Since the video had already been shot, we wanted to see if we could make it work. After some brainstorming, we found and worked with a rotoscoping expert who could manually remove the background from videos.  He created the following video:

We uploaded that through Arqspin’s web uploader and got this final 360 degree spin:

Pretty good! Do you have a video with a background that’s proving tricky to remove?  Get in touch with us, and we’ll see if we can help!