Help with Logo Tracking & Removal on Clothing

[Matthew Keane]

Hi,

I’ve been struggling with a challenging shot. A client has asked whether it’s feasible to remove the logo from the back of coveralls worn by a guy moving in a 25 second shot. The logo is white and blue with some text on red coveralls. The footage was originally shot on Beta SP in 1999 (which I know because, by coincidence, I shot it) and since transferred to DVCPro 25 when the company transferred their archives to digital tape.

I’ve been playing with the first 5 seconds of the shot. The guy swings from side to side a lot as he walks in and stands in shot, so the logo is distorted a lot horizontally. Also, the motion blur means it’s hard to get good tracking points on one side of the logo, despite precomping and increasing the contrast of the footage.

However, after hand-tweaked the corner pinning a bit, I have a reasonable track matte for the area that needs changing. Does anybody have any suggestions for the best way to change the colours but retain the luminance info – keeping the shadows and creases on the coveralls really help sell the shot. The tint plugin seems to flatten the contrast too much. I’ve tried keying and hue shifting, but it’s proving very difficult to get a clean key on the different areas of the logo. I played briefly with colorama, but that was getting a bit psychadelic. Colour-balance does a nice job of preserving the luma, but matching the red fabric was a pain…

It’s getting close, but I’m not really happy with the results. Does anybody have any suggestions for a different approach? Stuck with AE5.5 Pro for this.

Thanks,
Matthew

[Chris Smith]

as far as just changing the color but keeping th luminance, have you tried adding a hue/sat and clicked on the colorize button? then set your hue and saturation(in the colorize section) to match the uniform.

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com

[Matthew Keane]

Hi Chris,

Yeah, I’ve been playing with that, but getting the hue shifts on the different colours in the logo to match the red is fiddly, and as the guy moves the light changes quite a bit as his body is angled towards a window. Ugh! I’ve precomped the recoloured logo bits and now trying to match the lighting changes on that. Getting there… slowly!

Matthew