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Slowly dying trying to remove background text, with foreground obstruction
Hey fellas
I desperately need some advice on this one. About to throw in the towel.
I have a shot of a man putting on one of them safety hats for building sites. The camera moves handheld from right to left, keeping focus on the man, who stands still. Now here’s the issue. In the background there’s a van/truck, with text on it. I need all that text removed on both visible sides of the truck. But for the life of me, I can’t figure out how.
I tried:
AE 3D tracker, trying to get a decent track in order to project a cleaned-up freezeframe of both sides in 3d space. Roto out the man of cause. Didn’t work.
PFTrack, same procedure. No luck.
PFtrack, geometry track, with a maya cube roughly shaped like the truck, so I could UV the cleaned-up frames and put em back in behind the man roto. Didn’t work.
Mocha pro planar track. His body and movements take up most of the tracking space needed. It’s gold until he puts on the hat, obstructing everything, and the track goes mental.Here’s some ref snaps.
If any of you have an idea on how to achieve the clean sides of the truck, with the man in front of it, I would love to hear them 🙂 This text removal was a wish from the client upon seeing the first rough. So naturally, the shot wasn’t intended to contain any vfx work. And going back and shooting again isn’t an option.
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3 Replies
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It sounds like you are going the right way about it. It’s hard to give more specific feedback without actually seeing the shot. Can you post the clip and then maybe one of us can come up with a better way.
Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist -
My boss probably wouldn’t want the material to be posted online, so I can’t upload the clip itself, but I can however show you this gif, which shows the camera movement and the hassle at play.
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I would go with the tracking for as long as it works, then switch to good old-fashioned manual rotoscoping for the final second or so when he puts the helmet on. It sucks, but so does spending hours trying to get a track to work.
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