removing tracking marks from video

[Matt Silverman]

You could paint it out frame by frame, but chances are this will not be consistent. Instead you should always try to comp it out first. AE can not track masks without a work-around. Here is how I do this. There might be simpler ways, but this is similar to how I do it in flame and gives you a lot of control.

1 – Add footage to the comp and duplicate it. Shy or hide the bottom layer for later use.
2 – Track the four dots as RAW data on the non-hidden layer. Do not “Apply” the tracker.
3- When it finishes tracking select the layer and hit the U key to expose all keyframes. You only need the “Attach Point” keyframes, so you can click on the stopwatches to trash all keys in the “feature Center” and “Confidence” channels. Then hit the U key to close it, then again to only reveal attach point keys.
4 – Create a new Solid any color and set the opacity to 20%.
5 – Create a circular mask outside of the top right marker.
6 – Go to the position channel on the solid and option-click to set an expression.
7 – Pickwhip to the “Attach Point” on the top right tracker. This will write the expression for you to link the position of this layer to the position of the tracker, causing the layer’s centerpoint to offset.
8 – In the expression generated, add the words “value +” (do not type the quotes) at the beginning of the expression. This allows you to offset or keyframe the offset of the layer while still using the tracking data.
9 – Move the layer back into place so the mask is correct on the top right.
10 – Make three more solids and repeat steps 5 – 9 on each.
11 – After the four solid layers have masks tracking around the dots, bring their opacity back up to 100%
12 – PreComp the four solids and make sure to include the footage layer with the tracking data.
13 – Turn the visibility back on for the bottom layer original clip you hid and duplicate it.
14 – On the second layer add an Alpha Inverted Track Matte (hit F4 to switch to modes). Turn the visibility off on the bottom layer and you will now see holes cut where the four tracking marks were located.
15 – Turn the bottom layer’s visibility back on and slide the position of this bottom layer to an offset patch of skin to fill in the holes.
16 – Go back into the precomp and adjust the mask feathering and expansion so the skin blends together in the main comp.
17 – Color Correct the BG layer if necassary to deal with differences in skintone. Levels and Hue/Sat should take care of this.

For this shot, you might need to do a separate comp pass for each dot in order to get the ideal patch of skin for each corner. Get the top right looking perfect, then precomp everything in the main comp and start over with this precomp to tackle the upper left, etc.

-Matt Silverman
Phoenix Designs
San Francisco

[Migelowsky]

Thanks for taking yor time to help me Matt, I appreciate it .
I knew I had to do something like you said, I duplicated the layer, offseted the lower layer, but I didn’t know how to key the spots from the top layer and also didn’t know about the expression, thanks for putting all together for me . =)

[Majorasshole]

easier way

make a junk matte of just the area animate it as need be
then dupe the layer and make use levels etc to make all the skin color go white and the markers black, then invert that you now have a nice mask of the markers

you can now use that as a track matte to clone out the markers
you can dupe it a few pixels to the left or right to clone from
or fill it with a skin color if it doesn’t need to be perfect

[Chris Smith]

Good compositing is exploiting the diffences between what you want and what you don’t want (paraphrasing the great Matt Silverman when rotoing and matting out a Giraffe in the Commotion training tapes). What you don’t want is darker then what you do want. What exploits this is the built in math of the “Lighten mode”.

So without an exact tutorial, here is the basic steps to remove any one of the dots:

Draw a sloppy circle mask around a tracking dot. CUT and paste this mask to a new solid layer. Parent this solid layer to the null layer that has the original tracking data you had. Now the mask should ride along exactly on top of the tracking dot.

Dup the original tattoo video. Blur or Median this duplicate layer so the blur kills all the detail out and the color of the skin is the primary thing left over. Place this dup just above your normal footage layer. Place the solid layer with the mask just above this duplicate.

Now On the duplicate layer, set it’s track matte to ‘alpha track matte’. So now the alpha of the circle mask from the layer above it only allows a small chunk around the tracking dot to be blurred/medianed. It should look like a mini version of the show COPS where there is a skin colored blur over the tracking dot.

Now the magic part. Set the duplicate layer’s transfer mode from ‘normal’ to ‘lighten’. And now the image should look perfectly normal except there is no tracking dot. This is because the skin colored blur is lighter than the dark tracking marker from the original footage. So the lighten mode is doing the fine detail work for you. It’s basically saying “if the pixel below me is even slightly darker than the skin, then replace it with this skin colored duplicate”

[Dino Muhic]

Damn, i would LOVE to see some tutorials on this from you guys, so everybody could see it. And since I always wondered how a pro does this it is sure also interesting for us newbies, because we will have to do such things sooner or later, too.

Good work!

Cletus

[Migelowsky]

Thanks Arson asd Chris, these tips are going to be very useful, many options to solve problems.
The lighten transfer mode explanation was great, the truth is that I play with transfer modes but just
to see what happens, I just change them to see how it affects without knowing that it’ll do.
Thanks again to you all.

[Mike Clasby]

Chris, thnanks for that great mini-tut. I haven’t done much of this before and with his movie clip this was fast and relatively easy and definately magic. Thanks.

[Chris Smith]

Sure, Yikes. So you tried it on his clip and it worked out well?

I first figured this technique out when I was finishing a job. We had a shot with frosted glass that took up 1/2 the screen which would be the BG plate that we put ending graphics over. But me and the client hated these black flecks all over the glass that just wouldn’t come off on set. They asked if I could paint it out. The clone tool in AE 5 at the time was non-existant or not very easy to use. So I sat and panicked/thought of how I could exploit the darker black flecks and do some overall process because painting out about 40 flecks would have been a nightmare. That’s when I messed around with blurring the dup then using lighten. When I did that and they all “magically” disappeared without breaking out a single brush, I decided it was the coolest trick around 🙂

[Isaac Viejo]

Wow… it’s a long time since you wrote this… but I have to say this is one of the smartest tips I have read… I was trying to remove some tracking points from a finger linghting for a fireplace and I was turning crazy… now, magically they just disappear… amazing… still can see a little bit of the shape but it is almost there…

thanks …a few years later

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