Reducing “moire” from striped clothing

[Spencer Tweed]

Yeesh. I hate moire!

I’d need a little more info to help you out. For example, is the moire coming from After Effects or the medium it was loaded onto? Was this a defect in the camera itself? If you are down-sizing the footage in AE you will sometimes get moire.

First nail down where the problem is entered it, and then you can find the solution (or ask).

– Spencer

[Christian Wheel]

It’s coming from the DV camera it was recorded on. I can see it even when the camera is hooked up to a monitor.

Thanks

[Olin Padilla]

Beware that whenever you reduce moire in post, there is a good chance it will resurface with your eventual compression and/or scaling.

Best case scenario, you will be able to isolate the suit without having to roto, and then use Dave’s technique. Another cheap fix is to try adding noise. Again, the moire patterns might return when scaled or compressed.

[Walter Soyka]

[Christian Wheel] “It’s coming from the DV camera it was recorded on. I can see it even when the camera is hooked up to a monitor.”

If the moiré is caused by DV’s chroma subsampling (usually appears purple/green-looking), you might be able to reduce it by smoothing the chrominance channels. Use the Channel Combiner [link] effect (set to RGB – YUV), then Channel Blur [link] (G&B channels only), then Channel combiner again (this time, YUV – RGB).

If the moiré is luminance, though, there’s not really anything you can do aside from Dave’s suggestion of masking and blurring.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
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[Christian Wheel]

Thanks for the answers guys. Nobody asked me to “fix” it because I don’t think anyone’s been made aware there’s a problem. It just looks terrible IMO, and I suspect if I just make the normal NLE edits I was brought on to make, they will send it back with a “why the hell does this look so bad” note attached.

Perhaps on delivery of the edited version I will include a preemptive disclaimer attributing the effect to his choice of wardrobe.

It does seem to be luminance based, and I tested Dave’s suggestion on a couple of frames and it works, but that’s incredibly tedious and unless they pay for it, it’s really “not my job” at this point. 🙂

Thanks for the help…