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Activity Forums Adobe After Effects Need to do Object removal on a complicated shot

  • Need to do Object removal on a complicated shot

    Posted by Chris Wood on May 6, 2011 at 12:56 pm

    Hi there, I’m having some issues, I’m in a production group at Uni where I need to remove the shadow of a boom pole from a shot in a train station.

    My problem is that the camera pans quite quickly from the right to the left, so the shadow moves from off the screen to on the screen at the bottom left. What is also a problem is that obviously the perspective changes.

    I’ve tried using Mocha tracking and it SEEMED to stick to the floor well and track and change perspective and skew, and when I applied the logo to check that it stuck it did a pretty good job. However, when I brought the footage back into After Effects and pasted the corner pin data onto my clean plate layer it just rotated the footage onto the floor (In Mocha I did press align to layer)

    I then tried to use After Effect’s camera tracking tools and track two points on the shot, but look at the screenshots below, I can’t find two tracking points on the floor that are good because the actor obscures portions of the floor that would be good for tracking.

    Can anyone help me with this? Thanks.

    Here is the start of the sequence:

    https://img34.imageshack.us/img34/8140/screenshot20110506at134.png

    https://img5.imageshack.us/img5/8140/screenshot20110506at134.png

    And there you can see the shadow.

    From a frame in the middle of the sequence I have a really good clean plate and it looks the part, but because of the erratic movement of the camera it’s really difficult to get it to stick, especially seeing as the shadow expands over two different colours of the station platform.

    Anybody got any ideas that could help me? Cheers.

    Chris Wood replied 15 years ago 4 Members · 6 Replies
  • 6 Replies
  • Yuval Hoshen

    May 6, 2011 at 1:21 pm

    I’ve seen a job like that done using Red Giant Warp plugin to import the tracking data from Mocha in a much smoother way than the AE corner pin does it. Maybe you should give it a try.

  • Chris Wood

    May 6, 2011 at 1:43 pm

    Thanks, I’ll give it a shot.

    Any other ideas? Like I said, the track was ok, but when I put it into After Effects onto the clean plate it just went mental and didn’t apply properly at all.

  • Brian Charles

    May 6, 2011 at 1:54 pm

    I’m assuming you’re using the version of Mocha that comes with After Effects and not the Pro version with the new removal tool.

    https://www.imagineersystems.com/videos/mocha-pro-remove-overview-fix-it-in-post/view

    How many frames do you have to fix? Would the clone tool work?

  • Chris Wood

    May 6, 2011 at 2:44 pm

    I am using the pro version. They have it at Uni.

    Would I be able to create a clean plate in Mocha? Seems like it would be easier to do it all in Mocha than faff around in Photoshop and AE.

    I’ve been looking at loads of tutorials for advanced tracking in Mocha. They are helping, I guess, but my problem is that the shot has too much obscurity over areas that would be good to track, and the hard pan at the start doesn’t help either.

  • Shawn Miller

    May 6, 2011 at 5:12 pm

    Can you post the full clip? It might help to see the motion you’re talking about.

    Shawn

  • Chris Wood

    May 6, 2011 at 5:15 pm

    Ok well I’ve been using the remove tool in Mocha and it’s doing an 80% good job. I think it’s down to my bad tracking of the shadow that it isn’t working. I’ll see if I can get the clip posted by I’m probably closer to completing this than I thought. For some reason when I use the remove tool instead of getting some really nice smooth results I’m getting some artefacts. Thanks for all your help guys.

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