Removal of city lights in aerial shot

[Michael Bails]

Yes…it’s a shot in motion from a chopper. About 3-4 sec long. What about the new Roto brush…could that work in some way?

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

I would try to see if you can key out the lights using a luma key. This way you can create a matte for the lights. You can then track the shot, create a bunch of rough masks around the lights on the matte layer, apply track data and animate the mask opacity to reveal the matte and bring back the light. (Basically Dave’s first suggestion applied to a moving shot).

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

Mocha + Mocha Shape should do this nicely. Track large chunks of the building separately, on their individual planes. Within each plane, create X or B Splines to mask out individual lights/windows. Export the shapes individually and paste them in AE, onto a duplicate of your backplate. Change the Shape Colour to a black hue and animate Opacity (with the effect) to bring on the lighted version.

Lots of shapes are required to export but once you’ve tracked a plane, you simply have to link it to the shape layers that cut out the windows. So, track once and you will be able to link the tracked data to any new shape within the same plane.

HTH
RoRK

AE Training in South East Asia. AE templates for sale and rental. Click here for more

[Michael Bails]

Thanks…I’ll try the Mocha route!