Best way to remove this car from this drone shot

[Daniel Gillies]

You can try content aware removal tool but I don’t know how much coverage it will give you. Probably a combination of that and hand painting the few frames it is in the shot. Might be something to outsource to a decent compositor if you have the budget. Shouldn’t be more than a days work.

[John Mesata]

I was using mocha pro but I am having a little trouble with the removal texture looking wonky

[Thomas Luca]

I think the best way but certainly not the only way these days is an old Classic tried and true technique especially used by Uncle Walt or Walt Disney, ILM, and others. They used ink or airbrush on celluloid or film. It’s similar to wire removal in the early years of Cinema. And that’s Rotoscoping. Now it is not easy by the touch of a button but it will look the best because it is done by hand and a keen eye of an artist not a machine or computer. I used to take each frame that needed painting out and send them into Photoshop then paint out then send back in After Effects. But that is just a simple way of explaining it. There’s a whole lot more to it.

[Brendon Murphy]

Here’s the usual compositing approach for a shot like this:

-Degrain the footage

-Remove the lens distortion

-Do a camera track

-Replace the BG where the car sits in sections – road, rock wall, foliage beyond the wall, and far mountain. The standard way is to put cards (called “solids” in After Effects) in 3D space where each item is located. Then project a frame of the footage onto those cards. Clone stamp the projected textures to get rid of the car.

-Roto or re-create any detail that overlaps your patch, such as the mountain face and foliage near the middle of the shot.

-Re-distort the shot to match the original

-Regrain the footage

Even better, just put the re-distorted and re-grained patch on top of the original footage to avoid quality loss.