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How to Paint on a larger Precomp (w/ transparent surrounds) in Layer Panel?
Hi, Everyone.
I have a situation where I have a main scene that is 1920 x 1080. I need to remove some people from the shot, so I painted over them and tracked the painted still frame over the panning shot to get rid of them, but since some of the background is off screen and then comes on screen, I wanted to make a larger precomp with about 200 more pixels all around to paint beyond the borders of the still frame. If I did this in photoshop, I would just bring in the matte painting and track it on but, instead, I wanted to do it to a frozen frame in After Effects and paint on it there.
My only problem is, how do I get a pre-comp to load into the layer panel to paint both the source plate and the transparent surrounding space?
I am able to do this to one level of precomp by double clicking the precomp that is in the main comp, but an additional problem is that I need to apply a mask afterwards, so need to precomp again, so the mask comes after the paint effect, but once one precomp is nested in another, I can’t figure out how to load the correct instance into the layer panel to paint on it.
I know this is super complicated and I’m not doing the best job of explaining it – I am definitely not a day-to-day AE user, so have very big gaps in my knowledge.
Is there a simple way to load whatever you want into the layer panel to paint on it? I feel as if my hands are really tied in trying to get what I want in the correct environment for painting with the clone tool. Maybe it’s the double clicking method that’s getting me, but that is the only method I know and I’m not having any luck with google on this.
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
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2 Replies
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Instead of painting and tracking, have you considered using Content Aware Fill for Video? It might work just fine. Alternatively, you could just grab a few stills from the video and use tools in Photoshop to make your clean plate (don’t forget to renoise!)
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Thanks, Michael.
I actually did try content aware fill later on. It fixed one tricky bit, but failed on most of it, even with good reference frames.
I tried photoshop for my matte painting work at first, but I made one big file that covered the whole shot, by stitching various parts together. What I learned though was that there were too many subtle plane changes that were creating parallax issues, so I had to break the shot up into different bits. This is when I decided to scrap photoshop and make my “cards” in After Effects directly.
In the end, someone on another forum told me how I could right click on a precomp and tell it how to react to opening in the layer panel before alt+clicking on it. It is such an unintuitive command that I can barely even explain, but I was able to use it to load up the correct precomp in the layer panel.
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