Make eyes open

[David Roth weiss]

You’re barking way up a way too difficult tree… There is no way you’ll be able to even approach a solution that “sells,” unless you master a paint/compositing app and motion tracking, etc.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Mark Suszko]

There is some new technology out there that uses “Deep Learning” to teach an A.I. to map faces and heads onto other bodies, and you could certainly limit such an application to eye replacement, and perhaps even make it look convincing and realistic. The software is out there for people to experiment with. And in typical human fashion, instead of something noble or artistic, it’s being used mostly for simulating celebrity pornography.

But it’s not something that you can just do with a couple of button presses in the timeline. It takes time and expertise.

The “old-school” way to do this is with a combination motion tracking and rotoscoping, in AfterEffects, hopefully with high-rez captures of the original person’s rers, and this is not the kind of job that a beginner should learn those skills on.

[Blaise Douros]

Premiere can’t do it. There is absolutely no hope of this happening without going to After Effects.

I’ve used planar tracking in Mocha with After Effects to map still frames of open eyes onto someone’s face to eliminate a few frames of blinking. But doing this for more than a shot or two would be prohibitive. How much of this do you need to do?

[Steve Adams]

Thanks to everyone for the replies. The clip is about 5 minutes.

I don’t really want to become an expert in new software to do this if I can help it, so I’m probably limited to whatever I can squeeze out of PPRO CC2017. One thought I had was to maybe play with the Lumitri HSL Secondary by cranking the exposure and contrast up to a ridiculous amount, first, where I could detect some difference if indeed the eyes are actually open, and then map that color to white and finally take the exposure and contrast back down.

[Blaise Douros]

There is some very limited masking and tracking capability in PP2017, but I would be awfully leery of trying to get consistent results over a five minute video. Are there at least some cuts, so you aren’t trying to basically roto an entire five-minute clip? More power to you if you try. I wouldn’t try to “remap” colors, especially not if you can barely see the difference. I’d be tracking the eyes to see if I could place a simulated catchlight dot or something.

One thing that might help in the future when shooting subjects with this very narrow eye shape is if you can get your DP to place a low-intensity light very close to the axis of the camera, so that you can get some catchlight in the subject’s eyes.

[Tero Ahlfors]

[Steve Adams] “I don’t really want to become an expert in new software to do this if I can help it”

Alright, then you have two options

1) Reshoot

or

2) Hire a VFX artist to do it for you

[Steve Adams]

Ok, I think I understand the options. I just thought there might be something in Premier that could do it that I wasn’t aware of, but clearly not. Thanks.

[David Roth weiss]

Steve,

Even if there was a filter or effect that did come with Premiere, no automatic or default setting would create something that would be adequate – you’d still have to learn and master most of the same difficult tasks that you’d have to do if you did the same thing from scratch. VFX work is difficult and tedious, and best left to those who do it for a living.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

Dave,

Yep! This is what happens when happens when either the director or cameraman weren’t paying attention, or one of them said, “let’s fix it in post.” In any case, like you say, somebody should have noticed and said something to the talent during the shoot, period, end of story.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.