Hair removal in After effects or Mocha

[Curious Turtle]

Hi Ho,

If you’re talking about rotoscoping hair, then yes that is a tricky situation. What’s the final result you’re after? What’s the background like?

If you haven’t shot on a greenscreen, then I hope there’s good contrast beteen background and foreground. Here’s what I’ve done in the past:

i) Create a hi-con matte, using either luma key, or Calculations and Levels. This will not be perfect, but it is designed to give you a good edge key, to keep in details such as hair.
ii) Create an inner mask using rotoscoping. You can use mocha if you wish, or After Effects’ own tools depending on the subject. The idea here is to fill in gaps and remove extraneous objects not keyed by your hi-con matte.

The reason I do it in this order is because roto is time consuming. You want to do as much of the heavy lifting as possible with your key/hi-con matte.

Good luck,
Ben

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[Curious Turtle]

Should also add that you should follow normal keying procedure and draw a quick garbage matte first. Again, try and do as much of the main work using quick methods.

Cheers,
Ben

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[Ho Kim]

Dear: Ben

Thanks for sharing knowledge with me.

There is a woman right in fornt of wall in my scene. I had to seperate woman with the background. It hasn’t shot on a greenscreen. T_T;;

I did the roto the woman first, and used the level value to create the high contrast matte. The result of body came out good B&W matte, but It dosen’t give me a clean hair matte.

Should I erase all frame by frame either After effects or Photoshop(using animation sequence)? I am afraid that results get jaggy if I do it frame by frame.

Thanks for your answer and I saw your lecture, it was really helpful.

Have a niace day Ben

From HO.

[Curious Turtle]

Thanks for the compliment. :o)

If it’s a plain wall, with good contrast with the hair then the above technique should work. You should only concentrate on the hair with one hi-con matte.

If you can’t get a good enough result using this method, then you’ve got another couple of options:

i) Compromise on your hair. Depending on the hair style, you can often get away with cutting out some the smaller flyaway strands without affecting the overall look.
ii) Reshoot, preferably against a good greenscreen. You will spend less time pulling your hair out trying to keep the subject’s hair in, if you reshoot with the idea of creating a key.

All the best,
Ben

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[Ho Kim]

Thanks Ben.

I only concentrated hair area (just where I needed) and somehow it came out clean hair matte then, I changed B&W matte layer to stencil Luma in blend mode. extracting only woman in my sequences. I added garbage mask to cover where some gaps in my layer. I am not sure if I did it in proper way, but if I find out better way to solve this matter.
I will keep posting it.

Thanks Ben, and Have a nice day. ^^

From Ho.