Remove objects from static background (B&W footage)

[Kevin Dearing]

Not having seen your footage I’m not sure if this will help or not but I’ve used the technique in Maltaannon’s
“Simple Object Removal”
tutorial a LOT! It works great.. Hopefully it’ll be helpful to you!

–KTFA

[Mark]

BCC has a filter for this…I believe it is called motion key, but I am not sure that it would work in your situation…I would check it out on the Boris website…I know there is a tutorial and example.

Regards

Mark

Mark Harvey
Senior Editor
Le R

[Ross Mcdowell]

Hi guys,

Thank you for your quick replies, I think maybe I was slightly misleading with my topic subject. I am not really trying to remove objects from a static background but rather the subject of the clips. Both of the suggested fixes are great but are not really what i am after…there must be a way to do it.
I am not after a perfect key, but just something close enough that all i have to do is fix ups…because at the moment rotoscoping the motion is taking far far too much time.
Its frustrating because I can see the common pixels and know there must be a method to exract the character…There must be a way to look at the frame before and after the current frame and then combine these two in some way and the set it as a difference matte or something….I dunno…

Do you have any other ideas of how to tackle this problem?

Here is a sample image of the clip….

Ross McDowell
Animation Student

[Mark]

Borisfx motion key does what you are saying….or again, maybe I am misunderstanding…

Mark Harvey
Senior Editor
Le R

[Ross Mcdowell]

Howdy,

Thanks for your reply again,

I think its my fault for being totally unclear. The end result of what I am doing is to be able to take the subjects (baseball players) and place them into new environment. I know there is no perfect way to do it as green screens are used for a reason…but I would like to get closer or at least have some sort of starting point from which to clean the image up, rather than masking around each element and taking hours and hours.

Best

Ross McDowell
Animation Student

[Mark Suszko]

I think what I would try is to create multiple instances of the clip and in each one, push the blacks and whites alternately with contrast and brightness controls and use those as the basis of some selections. Stacking all the instances of the selections and flattening *that* could create the moving mask you want, without roto. Before you can do that, I imagine you need to motion track and stabilize the footage, but perhaps you can wait until compositing it into the new background comp. I think I would do it first, though.I will say this about roto: load up an ipod, set up a wacom tablet, have a Big Gulp and a box of cookies in arm’s reach, and you’d be done before you know it. The secret is to not allow yourself a cookie until you get x number of frames done:-)

Using vector masking, you don’t *need* to roto every frame, just certain keyframes, and a keyframed vector mask takes away more than half of the job right off the top. Roto is not everyone’s favorite thing, but the results, what you can do with the cut-outs once the roto is done… are fun for everyone; “I hate writing, but love having written”.

[Mark]

I agree with Mark…and sorry for not understanding.

Also, I prefer to do my rotoscoping of complex scenes in Photoshop, then I bring the sequence into AE for compositing…

Mark

Mark Harvey
Senior Editor
Le R

[Chris Wright]

i know in monet/mocha, a software program, you can roto then export out just the new mask as mask data or alpha or w/e. It makes rotos fast and easy. They developed it and used it in Harry Potter to track, remove, add objects to plain film shots. It works so much faster than AE that AE bought part of it in there new CS4 collection. If you think paying for some software is worth it, then go ahead.