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rotoing out a spliff
Dear CCers,
I have a shot from a documentary where one of the interviewees is clearly waving a joint in the air. The directors came to me to save the shot and I thought it would be a relatively simple track in Mocha, but the program is having trouble holding onto something to track.
The shot is interlaced HDV footage in dim light (ie noisy) and I’ve been after Mocha failed to hold onto anything in the video, I’ve started to paint it out with the brush frame by frame, with a looping plate underneath.
Cleaning out with the brush is giving me uneven and distracting wobbly edges.
If anyone has any other suggestions on how to clean the footage I would be very grateful. It is linked below.
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3 Replies
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Have you tried the de-spliffing plugin from Red Giant?
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
No matter what – you are looking at a lot of work here to get it done. I got AE’s tracker to track it pretty well, but your problem will be what do you replace it with? Removing it completely means rebuilding the palm of his hand. For a quick fix you may have to fuzz it out. You probably hate the sound of that, but it is the easiest solution.
The only other thing I can think of is to replace it with something else of a similar size. That is a big joint so it couldn’t just be a pencil. Maybe a remote control or a rolled up magazine? It would be hard to make it look realistic.
Wish I had a better answer for you.
Mac Pro 2 x 3 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon
32GB Memory
Dual-channel 4Gb Fibre Channel PCI Express card
Dell Display (23″ flat panel)
ATI Radeon HD 5770
AJA Kona LSi SD/HD capture card
Rourke 16 TB
Flanders 2460SOFTWARE
Mac OS X 10.6.5
FCP 7
After Effects CS5
Boris Continuum
Sapphire Plug Ins
All Trapcode Plugs
Zaxwerks Invig -
Haha, thanks Kevin. I did end up painting out the joint frame by frame (my AE tracker couldn’t get a lock on all the noise- would be interested to know how you managed to do it). But I am still stuck with when it crosses the palm. Tried cloning the color but it is still too bright and show ups. What’s more annoying is that there isn’t a clear shot of the fingers which I can steal a plate from and loop (as I did with the background).
Gonna retry tracking it and see if blurring it on the palm will work…
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In the options panel of the AE tracker I used Luminance, Track fields on, subpixel on, adapt feature on, process before checked with a blur of 2.
I selected the burnt end to track. It seemed to track decently to me, but I also didn’t try to apply anything to the track, so who know. I had to do some manual adjustments when it lost its way.
Good luck and thanks for the odd post.
Kevin
Mac Pro 2 x 3 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon
32GB Memory
Dual-channel 4Gb Fibre Channel PCI Express card
Dell Display (23″ flat panel)
ATI Radeon HD 5770
AJA Kona LSi SD/HD capture card
Rourke 16 TB
Flanders 2460SOFTWARE
Mac OS X 10.6.5
FCP 7
After Effects CS5
Boris Continuum
Sapphire Plug Ins
All Trapcode Plugs
Zaxwerks Invig
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