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hollywood FX – cords,ropes,string on a actor. how to get rid of them in AE
heey
I have a question.
you see alot of movies where actors have a special kind of suit with attachments for cords/ropes etc. i’ve seen it on the discoveryChannel program called “stuntdawgs” how to do stunts like that. where an actor been lifted 5meters into the air, because people on the other side where pulling the cord that whas attached to the actor.
or that the actor fell from a 50meter building and landed perfectly because on the other end of the rope there was a stopping mechanism.now my question,
in After effecs, how do you get rid of the cords/ropes. okey you can put a mask arround the actor and change it frame by frame and then put the same background but then without the actor above that layer.
but that means that your camera movements are limited in that kind of shots (you have to have 2 exact same shots, one with actor, one without.) so can this be do otherwise??thanxs
Bart
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10 Replies
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Sometimes you can mask out the ropes, then use that as an inverse matte for a copy of the background layer, then nudge that background copy a few pixels to the left or right until it fills in the hole left by the rope. Essentially, you’re repeating the background thyat was right next to the rope. Since the rope is thin, it often works. Sometimes, with moving ropes, you don’t move the background, but nudge it forward or back a few frames in time so the frame when the rope wasn’t there now fills in the frame when the rope was there. You see?
Or you paint in some blue … there are many ways that don’t require two motion-control plates as you described.
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Painting it can be tricky, you will see chatter.
There are some cheesy wire removal plug-ins that sometimes will do the job if the shot is not to close to camera.
Honestly I am not sure if AE is the desired app for this job, not to say it isn’t done. But you did say “Hollywood” and Hollywood doesn’t use AE to do wire removal.
I would like to read more about AE and wire removal. Pleas do post links. -
Imagineer makes some products that would work well for wire removal, Mokey comes to mind.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
AE has the CC Simple Wire Removal effect…you’re not going to get rid of a huge harness rig on an actor. Most of the time the harness and rigging close to the body is hidden by wardrobe. Most wire removal works by “folding” or “mirroring” a line of pixels in on itself in order to removal a line..essentially duplicating pixels on either side of the line and copying/blending them over the line to cover it up. It can then be keyframed to follow movement.
I wouldn’t be surprised if many “hollywood” films use AE for a variety of effects including wire removal.Erik
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overview
okey. i realy don’t know if that cc simple wire removal works, I will have to find out.good idea though
i think that for shots where the cord,rope,wire is straight al the time, for example when somebody is falling from a building. then the masking isn’t that hard. like Steve and Epontius explaines just fill the gaps of the wire with some pixels by nudging the copy background.
when there are difficult shots, duplicate the footage and use the spaces on that layer were the cord doesn’t go yet and mask it over the other layer (again Steve explaines). little tricky I guess, but most of the shots aren’t that long, so i could try that.
that mokey software: https://www.mokey.com/products/mokey/
looks great, but is stand-alone and can not be used in AE. i think it works wellthanxs for all those good ideas
Bart
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I’ve actually done a few rig removals with AE. I did a combination of mattes and painting with the clone tool. I’ve a pretty good success. But the other guys are right, it’s not ideal when you’re talking Hollywood.
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[Ultimate Bart] “that mokey software: https://www.mokey.com/products/mokey/
looks great, but is stand-alone and can not be used in AE. i think it works well”It can’t be used inside of AE, but after having the wires removed in Mokey the footage can be imported into AE no problem if you want to do more to it. Mokey is a stand-alone program, but it’s meant to exist in a workflow with other programs.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
jep, i know ^^
but mokey itself isn’t a simple tool. so learning to deal with it and it’s many features takes time. and therefore AE is yeah, quicker to work with. -
Mokey is about $11,000 usd for a floating license. You could have an effects house do the shot for less and use your free time and saved money on your other shots.
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okey, that’s alot of money. I realy wanna do the effects myself (it’s all about the fun of seeing your own creation). so back to AE then.
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