How do I remove the background while recording video on iPhone?

Use SplitRig's Face Mode. The iPhone's Neural Engine removes your background from the front camera and overlays just your face onto the rear camera feed in real time, baked into the recording — no green screen needed.

How to remove your background while recording on iPhone

Face Mode uses on-device segmentation to overlay just your face on the rear-camera footage — no green screen.

What Face Mode actually does

iOS 15+ provides a VNGeneratePersonSegmentationRequest API that runs on the Neural Engine and outputs a per-frame mask of any humans in the image. SplitRig wires this up to the front camera, multiplies the mask against the front feed, and composites the result on top of the rear camera feed using Metal.

The result: your face floats over the rear-camera scene. The transition is sharp and the latency is negligible — the segmentation runs in parallel with the camera capture, not serially.

How to use it

Open SplitRig.
Tap the layout picker (the icon at the bottom-right of the control tray).
Choose Face Mode.
Position yourself — the front camera now shows only your head and shoulders over the rear scene.
Tap record. The composite is baked into the saved video.

Tips that actually work

Light your face evenly. Person segmentation can fail at the edge between your hair and a similarly-colored background. A direct front light helps.
Stay 60–120 cm from the front camera. Closer than that, parts of your face go off-frame. Further, the model has less data to work with.
Plain backgrounds aren't required — but a busy background helps the contrast and produces a sharper cutout.
Avoid glasses with thick frames. Thick-rim glasses sometimes confuse the segmenter at the temples.

Why on-device matters

Cloud-based "remove background" services exist, but they require uploading every frame to a server. That's slow, expensive, and a privacy risk. SplitRig's segmentation runs entirely on your iPhone's Neural Engine — no frames leave the device, ever. Your footage is yours.

Common questions

Can I switch out of Face Mode mid-recording? Yes. The layout picker works during recording — switching modes does not interrupt the file.

Does it work on iPhone 11? Yes, person segmentation is available from iPhone XS onward, but it runs faster on iPhone 13 and later thanks to the more powerful Neural Engine.