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need creative suggestions for painting/matteing out portion of image
Hi,
I’m working on a micro budget project, and I’ve been challenged to try to paint out portions of various images with the tools I have on hand. The project is actually being cut in AVID Xpress Pro, but I also have Final Cut Studio 2 at my disposal. I don’t have a lot of experience in Motion, but thought the paint function sounded promising, just not so sure how to go about it. So I thought I’d pass my challenge on to you geniuses.
The footage I need to paint out or matte out is a small white building set on a foresty hillside. The solution we’ve been using thus far is simply duplicating the image, cropping out everything but a small area of the hill with only forest in it, and then positioning that over the white building. It involves quite a bit of tedious keyframing as the shot is not static. It’s a dirty little solution because of obvious disparate shading and motion, etc. Looks okay now, but once it’s projected….
I’m interested in seeing if anyone has a better solution using the tools I have (FCPS2, Avid Xpress Pro w/Sapphire plug-ins) or maybe free piece of software or a plug-in that might serve us well in this particular case. Tedious solutions are okay as long they look better than what we’ve been doing.
Thanks in advance.
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5 Replies
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Can you post a picture of the shot you’re working on, or a low rez video of it? It might help to see just how much movement you’re dealing with in the shot.
Michael.
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Unfortunately, I cannot send out any images. the best I can do is describe it.
We’re dealing with a CU on a runner with no hills in the background and then an extreme zoom out to include the landscape. (so the white building will have to be painted out of the zoom as well) Once the zoom finishes, the movement is limited mostly to the slight handheld movements you typically see in DV handheld footage (Camera was a Canon XL2) So there isn’t a lot of major movement at those stages, when the camera is fully zoomed out, just the slight up-down-lef-right sporadic movement of a camera that isn’t locked down. The size of the white building is quite a small, unrecognizable rectangle.
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Use an animated mask in AE.
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Do you have Boris RED on the Avid? They have a great filter called motion that can do what you want.
https://www.borisfx.com/html/products/red4/tutorials/motion_key/MotKey.html
Regards,
Joe Womble
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If you don’t have After Effects (and Grinner is spot on, it’s probably best for this) or Boris RED (and Joe is spot on, it will fix this very easily) you could try this:
V1–original shot. Same shot on V3 and add a luma key to remove the house. Crop and keyframe to follow it if too much of the rest of the shot keys with it. Layer this same shot on V2 and adjust it so a portion of the trees will fill in where you’ve keyed the house. This will keep (or help keep) the zoom and camera movement consistent without having to motion track anything. It’s a long shot, but it could work.
Just make sure you get as much feather as you can on V3 to smooth things out. Nothing says bad compositing like a hard line in the middle of your frame.
If all else seems hopeless, find an After Effects guy/gal and pay them to do it. Sounds like a simple enough fix that shouldn’t cost you too much.
Michael.
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