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Removing Text from Dry Erase Board
Hello, and thank you for reading. This is my first post…
I have been working with the Final Cut Suite for the past 2 years or so, editing video and authoring DVDs for my professional organization on a donation basis.
I have 2 hrs. of footage with something written on the dry erase board behind the presenter that has to go. What would be the fastest way to do this? I have experimented with Garbage Matte and Masking, but his head often goes in front of the text and it would be a nightmare to do that for the entirety of the video (I’m trying to avoid blurring it out in order to maintain the overall coherence).
I also have After Effects, though I don’t exactly know how to use it yet. I’m sure I could sort it out with a little guidance. There’s loads of tutorials out there, but I still sense that I haven’t figured out the correct procedure to learn for this task. Rotobrush seems more geared towards getting rid of the background entirely…I just need to remove a small rectangle of the video and replace it with an image of the board without the text or even a solid color.
Thanks in advance for any advice you may have, and be well. -
2 Replies
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If the presenter is in the area that needs to be replaced you’re going to have to rotoscope around him using after effects or motion. Its very easy to do and there are lots of tutorails out ther. But because you need to go frame by frame and adjust the mask it can be a long slow process depending on how long you need it to last.
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Maybe you can use the 3-way color corrector to “select color” on just the text area ink color, and replace it with the color of the board.
Hand-done frame by frame roto IS a pain. PF track I think has an online demo somewhere on the COW for automating a tracking of a shot and then using the tracking data to back thru the shot, erase and replace a significant area of screen with a clone of another part of the same scene, without affecting the person walking thru the shot. If you can’t find the demo, you might try duplicating the video track, stacking them together, then using the crop tool to pick a piece of whiteboard that is clean, and just reposition it in the shot. Because this “patch” is from the same shot, just moved over, it already “tracks” with any camera movement, to a point.
Failing that, all is still not lost; I often suggest exporting a shot as an image sequence, importing the folder to photoshop, and using batch actions to heavily automate the roto process, which, in one case I had, turned a 3-day job into about a five minute one, with more consistent results as well.
Update, one more brainfart: can you do a luminance or color key off the ENTIRE whiteboard, and replace the keyed part with plain blank whiteboard color? This gets around the need to roto or mask, if (pray) the speaker wasn’t wearing a white shirt? Think of it as the same technique used for a sky replacement.
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