Get Out of My Shot: Removing Objects with Mocha Pro & After Effects

hello this is mocha product manager Martin Brennan and today we're going to be getting rid of a man there's always one that extra who wanted a bit more screen time the relative you didn't expect to turn up at the wedding video or in this case the random bystander who gorks at the filming going on because the council wouldn't let you close off the street for a simple shoot at any rate this is what the mocha removed tool was designed for getting rid of things and people who shouldn't be there the main problem with mr. Stanley McGuirk are over here however is he's always in one place so the only option we have is clean plates ie we're going to have to paint him out ourselves and then let Moka handle the rest our shot today is provided by pond5 who stock a pretty amazing selection of video so to start off inside After Effects we're going to load the mocha effect and then just click the large friendly button at the top this loads our mocha GUI and we can get started the first thing we need to do is a row to out the actors shoulder so it doesn't interfere with any of the other layers we need to make for this remove we will choose the X line tool to draw our shape and roughly get the outline making sure to track outside the edges rather than internally we're going to do a basic shear track as there isn't a lot of perspective change we don't care too much about planar accuracy here because the shoulder is an organic shape and will naturally fall off to reveal more of the sides the rest of the shoulder we'll just have to tweak manually so once we have our shape and our parameters set up we can now go ahead and track forwards and just adjust the shape as we go to make sure that it still fits over the shoulder after a point the shoulder is no longer going to interfere with the remove so we can stop and trim the layer down there's no point in doing more work than we actually have to rather than refining this roto at this point however I'm going to leave the rough shape for now because I want to make sure it doesn't interfere with the next couple of tracks the next important track is the bystander we're going to grab our trusty x-plane tool and draw this shape as close as possible to what we want to remove so we don't need to clean up as much we then drag the layer below the shoulder layer as Mercker assumes top players that are in the foreground and lower layers are in the background very importantly you should also remember to turn off previously tracked layers it's good to get in a habit of doing this so that you don't accidentally retrack layers later on I'm also going to turn on track mats under the mat view button so we can make sure the shoulder is always being cut out of the bystander track we then track our bystander layer backwards and forwards from the drawing point to get the overall motion the good thing about this bystander is he's actually standing still so there's actually not a much additional roto to do here and it's much easier than the shoulder was for the final layer we need to draw a background layer now I'm doing something slightly different to normal cases here in most omocha removes you'd be encouraged to track all the planes in the scene that make up the background in order to get accuracy the wall the floor and the back plane this is because parallax and a lot of moving scenes will make you remove disjointed if you don't track the individual planes here because the background is so blurry and we don't have much obvious parallax we can just wing it and use a single layer the point I want to emphasize here is that you should make mocha work for you as you see fit sometimes breaking the rules helps you rather than hinders you and in the case of removes if the audience never knew it was there and not really going to look so now we're just going to do what we did for the previous layer I'm going to drag my layer down to the bottom of the stack I'm going to turn on my track mats just so I can see that cut out we'll rename our layer to something interesting like background and I'm going to turn off the previous layers Cooke so we're gonna set the minimum percentage of pixels quite high and I'm also going to turn the surface and the grid on this is really important to see how the accuracy of your background track is going because the background track is the most important one to get the tracking accuracy correct otherwise you're going to get artifacts and problems in your remove so we're just making sure that's tracking correctly throughout the shot using that surface and grid tool you'll also notice here that I need to extend the shoulder time line that I trimmed earlier as it's still interfering with the background track the good thing is you can re extend and keep moving your layers around as you go so there's no harm done once we're finished refining the shoulder mat so that the track is no longer interfered with we continue on with our background track until the end and then just quickly scrub through the shot to make sure the track is looking accurate so when we play it back you can see now that this track is nice and accurate the grid is showing us that it's not bouncing around too much so we're going to get a good remove off that background plate now what we need to do is fix up that shoulder so that it is accurately against the shoulder edge because this shorter edge is going to be cut out of our final remove patch so now we just need to go back and refine all of that map edge to make it nice and clean to refine the shoulder we're going to turn on the quick stabilized mode which will simply take the tracking data from our layer and lock its position based on the motion this makes it much easier to work with moving objects while we're refining an edge then using the point insert tool we're going to go through and find all the little bumps and dips in the jacket to make sure they're covered accurately with additional control points smoothing those curves out where necessary using the x-plane handles if you're having a hard time seeing the edge you can turn off the colorize mode in the mattes which will cut the area out for easier viewing you can also turn on invert matte in the layer properties to see if any of those edges are bleeding out of the shape using a combination of these views we go through and refine the shape throughout the necessary covered areas when you're done you should make sure none of that edge is peeking through or it may be used as part of the remove render and show odd artifacts once all our layers are primed and ready it's time to select our bystander layer and move over to the remove module to set up the parameters make sure the first and last frame parameters match your project in and out points this will avoid it referencing frames that you're not you using also turn on auto step this is not always necessary especially since we're using clean plates but in other cases it saves you having to manually work out which frames to step over by default the frames before and frames after values take the max range of the clip so we want to reduce this down to a more realistic value here there are actually less than a hundred frames in the clip but I'm just gonna set it to a hundred as that will be fast enough for my needs and mocha is smart enough to stop looking if the frame count ends before that value now for the tricky part since our bystander is not moving we need to paint him out manually there's not much we can do about this but we'll just have to save out our clean plate and get painting we want to find a frame that's as close as possible but doesn't obscure any detail here on frame four five four we get up nice and close and we can still see his feet so it's a good place to start to far forward in the sequence and it doesn't have much details so we all we need to do now is hit the create button and save our clean plate out to disk over in Photoshop we can now begin the clean plating process I'm not going to show the whole paint process here because frankly it's going to vary so much from case to case it's not worth going into too much detail the main thing is I tend to use a combination of the clone stamp tool and the patch tool and you want to try and grab samples as close to the offending object as possible so you maintain detail in the blur without looking repetitive so here's our final result painted out we just need now to save this and go back over to mukha so if we go back to frame 454 and look at our clean plate we can now see it's painted out on the right frame if we open up the Edit dialog you can see that our frame is in the clean plate list and we can add to this list if we need further frames down the track the next thing I'm going to do is check use clean plates exclusively there is literally no point in not checking this option because we can't reference anything else in the background to help remove this shot this will also improve the rendering performance significantly because we're not needing to check any other frames for reference now I'm going to do a test render back on the first frame of the sequence to see how it's looking first up we'll turn off our overlays with the button up here or use the shortcut back tick key so we can see the shot without the splines being in the way and then we can click render and as you can see here it's not looking great there's a definite edge to the patch this is because we're using a single plate across the whole shot and the light is varying over time as the camera moves so this is where we start using the illumination tools from top to bottom to find the best result let's first try with linear linear is a nice way to adjust lighting progressively through a shot and here you can see this isn't really helping either the light being pulled in is actually darkening our shot too much so now we're going to try interpolated illumination which will be much better looking at the subtle changes over time now keep in mind interpolated illumination modeling is much much more performance intensive than the other rendering modes as it's calculating how light is changing on every single frame however it's a lot faster when using clean plates exclusively because again we're only having to reference specific frames so rendering with this on you can see we're getting a much more realistic result there's still a subtle halo edge here so we're going to fix this by turning back on our spline and selecting all the points then adding some edge width to the remove shape to pull it out a bit further now when we render the remove it's much cleaner and we can test a few more frames to see how it's looking across the shot this looks good so it's time to save and close and then render back to the main host timeline back in the After Effects interface we twirl down the module render section choose remove from the module drop down and click render so removing unwelcome people from video is easy enough to do with the mocha remove module it saves you the hassle of a reshoot and then you can get back to more interesting tasks like invoicing if you have any questions as always please jump over to the forums at Boris effects calm thanks for watching and good bye

Channel: Boris FX Learn

Views: 74,269

Keywords: Mocha, Mocha Pro, Adobe After Effects, Tutorial, remove objects, clean plate, Adobe Premiere Pro, project cloak adobe, Remove Module, how to remove, VFX, visual effects, planar tracking, plugin

Id: 2Tq9299aCB0

Length: 10min 54sec (654 seconds)

Published: Thu May 03 2018