Cleaning up dirty skirting board

[Joseph W. bourke]

The question is, is the shot a moving shot? If not, make a soft mask, and duplicate a clean part of the skirting board (we call it a mop board in New England – I love the English language!), moving it over the grungy part. The one thing you don’t want to lose is the nice detail from the grain and wear and tear in the wood. It will make it look fake.

If you can’t nail the masked shot, you might try a masked blur layer to approximate depth of field, and drop the focus down in the grungy part. This runs the risk of not looking real, because the worst part of the grunge is in the foreground. You could also think about just doing a soft focus vignette all the way around, as a frame.

I really think the best result will be had by doing the mask. If it’s a locked shot…no problem. If it’s a moving shot, think tracking.

Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV

[Phil Beastall]

Hi, thanks for your response! Mop board – thats a new one. I’ve not heard of it before!

I’ve a slow forward tracking shot, so a blurred mask is quite difficult to use because firstly, you’re right, it looks fake, but also because the perspective changes so much as it goes past the camera. I even tried raising the levels up to get rid of the darker patches but that didn’t really help.

I guess a sensible solution would have been to shoot with a clean skirting board!! Thats the problem with being an editor, because you receive footage and wonder, what the hell were they thinking?!

[Craig Hellen]

hmm it sounds like a tricky tracking job.
if you can do a 4 point track you should (maybe with some tweaking) you might be able to preserve perspective.

If the track points go out of the shot you can track on nulls and parent them. and then parent the parent the composite element to the null that moves for the duration of the shot.

(probably not the best explanation but i did it on a tutorial and the memory is hazy, i think i saw it on video co-pilot

Cheereo!

Co-Director Podchains Ltd
Video Producer / Motion graphics designer https://bexmedia.net