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Technique advice for “Fuzzing Out” logos in a shot
I have a few shots in a video that need a logo on a mans shirt to be “fuzzed out” like you see very often on reality shows these days. I haven’t needed to do this before and was wondering what the best ways to do it are.
I have all the tools in Final Cut Studio, Photoshop, and AE 5.5 available.
The shirt he is wearing is flat brown so that will make things eaiser. (The client would prefer the shirt to look real, as if there was no fuzzing, or at least as un-noticable as possible.) I was thinking of just using a brown color matte cropped and shaped into an oval, with a feathered edge, that simply covers the logo, then manually motion tracking it along with the persons movement. (Which is short and minimal) The hard part will be when he waves his arm in front of the area, how can I blend the matte around his arm and hand?
Any other techniques are very welcome. Thanks.
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6 Replies
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Chroma key out his shirt to reveal a blurred shirt.
V2 = original logo video with chroma keyer keying out the shirt colour. Blur the matte to extend over the logo
V1 = brown textured up like his shirt, or a blurred version of V3This way when his arm moves across the shirt the keyer will take care of the matte.
That’s overly simple there are other techniques but I think it will work as long as the logo isn’t too big or white!
– Rick
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Rick Dolishny
Discrete Editors COW Leader
http://www.dolish.com – http://www.digitalimagefest.com -
What you suggested in the original post will work too, and you can do it in Motion, Shake, Combustion, Boris or AE. Just do one treatment right up to the point the arm covers the logo, then save settings and do the same setup again a few frames later when it’s revealed again. The chromakey trick is a good one: if the logo is one color, you could chromakey out just the area of the logo instead of an entire shirt. You could also use Motion to grab area of shirt that is blank and motion-track it over the logo with a soft edge and this would also look better than a plain blur.
The real old fashioned way to do the trick is to just lay two identical tracks ina sandwich, blur one, and then set a soft edge wipe to reveal the blur layer below.
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First off, After Effects is almost certainly a better tool for this than FCP. I say that because of AE’s very precise and controllable masking and tracking tools.
Second, forget about it seeming natural – it probably won’t happen. You’ll try and try, but the best you can hope for is that 90% of the audience won’t notice something is wacky. That’s your best case.
Here’s how I’d approach it. Flat brown is never flat brown – you’ll notice that as soon as you try pasting a brown spot over the shirt. Feathered or no, there are subtle gradations of color, there’s texture from the material, and there’s video grain in the clip.
I would look for an area of the shirt just above the offending logo, and look at cloning that section over it. In motion, this can be tricky, but it sometimes works. Duplicate your layer, then draw a mask on the top layer about 10-20% larger than the logo around the logo. Now move the mask up until it is on the nondescript area of the shirt. Then move the position of that layer down until it covers the logo. You’re basically duplicating the pixels from above the logo to cover it. You drew the mask slightly larger so that you can now feather the mask and see if it blends. The advantage to this method is that when the shirt moves, the texture of the cloned area moves with it. You may need to animate the mask as the logo moves around, and so some careful surgery when an arm passes in front. That means manually rotoscoping the matte to track around the arm. there is a bit of leeway there. You’ll notice that when one object passes in front of another, the eye will forgive a lot. you could get away with a really rough roto’d mask for the couple of frames it’ll take.
Another method is to use transfer modes and tracking points to animate a fake section of shirt. Make a still out of your footage, then crop out an appropriate size patch somewhat larger than the logo. Use AE’s motion tracker to track the logo, then apply those keyframes to your “patch”, so it moves with the logo. At this point, even if you feather it and add grain to try to match the footage, it will still look artificial. But, you can try to ease the effect by using transfer modes. Using the “color” transfer mode will at least insure that the logo is now brown, but you’ll probably still be able to see the outline. Duplicate your patch layer and use “luminance”. This will impart the shirt texture back to the patch. This may still end up looking like a fake, but at least it’s a fake that’s the same color and rough texture as the rest of the shirt.
That’s probably as close as you’ll get to making it unnoticable. Unfortunately it’s going to be a long, laborious process, and mostly a manual tweaking one. I hope you’re only covering a short group of soundbites, not a 20-minute interview. I hope it’s an interview in a controlled environment, and the talent doesn’t move much.
It may still be impossible to get a good match, in which case you may simply throw an adjustment layer on with a gaussian blur or mosaic filter, then animate the mask to cover the logo. Sometimes that’s the best you can do. Sometimes it’s easier to reshoot.
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All I have to say is that you better be charging the client by the hour because it is going to take a liong long time to get it to loot like it was never there. If he dosnt want to pay for it use a simple blur over it.
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This is probably completely left-field, but another way of doing it *ONLY* if it is a short piece, would be to export a filmstrip from AE, touch up the frames one at a time in photoshop (make a cloned ‘blob’ on a new layer from the existing pixels from the shirt that will cover the logo and ‘paste’ it over each frame.) That way when you get to the arm moving part, you can ‘erase’ or ‘mask’ the part of the brown layer that you need to reveal the arm. Then you can bring the filmstrip in AE again and voila!
I haven’t done this myself, but it should work, and avoids animating masks which is probably more time-consuming and less accurate (if you rush it!)
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BY FAR the easiest way is with CHV’s clone plugin. Totally keyframable, fast and works like magic.
Have a wonderful day.
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