How to Remove a Logo with Mocha Pro, Adobe After Effects + Photoshop

hi I'm VIN Mori Ali from Boris effects and in this tutorial I'm gonna show you how to quickly remove unwanted logos and lavalier mics in production footage the process is actually pretty easy and there are a couple of tools at our disposal to make quick work out of it for this tutorial I'm going to be using the mocha Pro plugin for After Effects now there are a number of ways to remove an object or logo from your scene the first and most preferable of course being don't have the object or logo in your shot to begin with but often on low-budget productions we either don't have the time to make the correction or maybe it was something we just didn't notice now when I was filming this scene for the series staying in Boston I didn't have a lot of time to work with I only had a couple of hours to shoot a scene at a dojo before I had to shoot another scene at a stable before I lost the Sun there were child actors animals basically a lot of variables of play and not a lot of time so when my actor here showed up wearing a Nike logo on his shirt I couldn't send him off to change and I didn't want to have to have him flip his shirt inside out fortunately mocha Pro made fixing this pretty easy to begin with I've assembled my scene in Premiere and I've separated out each of the shots where Fletcher's shirt can be seen now I prefer to cut everything together in Premiere and then bring the individual shots into a linked After Effects comp that way if I need to make any changes I can quickly go in and make those changes and see it update immediately in my timeline now once I have my Eclipse setup in After Effects I'm gonna go to my effects and presets and apply mocha Pro from there I can launch the mocha user interface now in order to do a remove it's important to remember two things the first is I need to have the licensed version of mocha Pro in order to access the remove module mocha AE which is included with After Effects and mocha pixel chooser which is available in continuum and sapphire filters do not have the ability to remove images secondly when doing a remove I need to track two things the object I want to remove in this case the Nike swish and the area that I want to insert my replacement my actors shirt now the first thing I want to do is make sure that I'm only selecting my swish to make this easier I'm gonna hold down the Z button and drag upwards to zoom in on my object holding X will allow me to move the image with the hand tool so I can reposition it to my liking okay that looks good I can clearly see the swish but it's pretty close to the text so I'm gonna want to be careful not to cut off the edge of my text with my spline tool selected I'm going to draw a quick mask around the logo and adjust it as necessary now in this shot my actor is pretty straight on with the camera but regardless I always want to make sure that mocha is tracking the right thing mocha is a planner tracker meaning it tracks a group of pixels to make sure it tracks the right group of pixels I want to align my surface tool now the surface tool as its name implies allows me to visualize the surface that mocha is tracking I can enable a handy grid here and the surface tool here by adjusting the surface tool I can align my grid to the object surface if the surface and grid slip off in a strange direction I'll know that I need to select a better area to track once that's done I can track forward to track the object's movement in my scene when it finishes I can turn off my grid and play it back that's looking pretty good and it's a pretty solid track now as I mentioned before when doing your remove I'm gonna be tracking two things the object I want to remove and the background since I'm gonna be dealing with multiple splines I just want to keep things organized so I'm gonna rename this layer swish okay now that I've told moko what I want to remove I have to tell moko where this remove is supposed to go to do that I'm gonna create a new spline shape around the area where the remove is going it can be any shape or size so long as it contains my swish track remember all this track needs to do is tell Moka hey this is the general area where you should be looking before I forget I'm gonna rename this track background now here's the thing if I play this back the new spline has no motion tracking now I could tell Moka to track it but here's a much quicker solution with my background track selected I'm gonna go to my layer properties and here where it says a link to track I'm just gonna select swish and now my background track has inherited all the tracking data from my original track okay now that Moka knows which object is being removed and where the replacement needs to go there are two final things I need to do before I move on to the remove module first track order is very important MOCA reads from the top down so the object that I want to remove needs to be above my background track next with the switch selected I want to feather the edges a little bit this is going to ensure that whatever I replace my swish with blends nicely without any hard edges now I can do this by slightly increasing the edge width and hitting set notice how when I do this I can see the spline edge change one thing to remember is that my background spline should never intersect the remove layer I'm gonna want to play through my timeline and make any necessary adjustments to make sure I don't cross the streams not only would that be bad I'll get really weird results with that done I'm gonna head on to the remove module now here I have a few options that will vary depending upon what kind of remove I'm doing on the Left I have access to my input clips this is where I'm gonna create and select a clean plate basically the new image that will replace my swish logo the search range is where I can tell moko to look ahead for background data this is really useful when I have an object moving across the scene that I want removed it allows Moka to anticipate what the background looks like over time and use that as a replacement but for this tutorial I can pretty much ignore it since I'm gonna be working exclusively with clean plates illumination model and this section here will interpolate the lighting in the scenes so that a remove matches the overall look from my remove I can leave all of these at default okay so with my switch layer selected I'm gonna select create to create a new clean plate what this does is create a tiff image snapshot of whatever frame the CGI is parked on so in this instance it will be the first frame feel free to move the CTI to any frame that gives you a good clean shot of your object now I'm gonna save this TIFF to my desktop or somewhere easy to find and then launch Adobe Photoshop and what I want to do is essentially paint out the swish so to do that all I need to do is take the clone stamp tool and paint it out now I typically zoom in until I start to see the individual pixels this is going to give me more control as I paint out my swish note that I don't have to get it perfect but I do want to make sure that I don't have any obviously repeating patterns the idea is to get it as reasonably close to the original without drawing attention to the fix when I'm done I'm gonna hit save and head back - MOCA now I want to use my clean plate exclusively so I'm gonna check this box here and then go up and render the frame and there we go now if I toggle off the overlays I can see that looks pretty seamless by clicking the render forward button MOCA will interpolate my clean plate across the entire clip but remember if you chose a frame from elsewhere in your timeline don't forget to also render back so you don't miss any frames and there you go if i zoom out it's looking pretty seamless when I'm satisfied I can close out of mocha and save now in order to render the effect in After Effects I'm gonna need to enable the module renderer I'll select your move from the drop-down and enable render and there we go now one thing to remember is how mocha will interact with other plugins let's say I wanted to adjust the contrast or the brightness any effect I add needs to be below mocha in the stack so for example if I add a basic brightness contrast filter and I bring that down I get the result that I'm expecting but if mocha is at the bottom of the stack the filter doesn't render this is because the mocha mask is blocking it something to keep in mind if you have multiple effects already stacked when you bring your clip over from premiere or if you're doing additional color grading now these steps are identical regardless of what I need to remove provided that I'm using clean plates so for example in this clip you can see that my lead actress is wearing a lavalier mic obviously that's not something I wanted my finished product as before I can track the movement of the mic in mocha as well as her shirt by creating a clean plate I can then bring the frame into Photoshop and paint out the mic the difference here is that unlike with the swish my actress moves in such a way that there's a significant change in the lighting as she moves into a bit more shadow this can be problematic since the remove is based off a single frame and that frame doesn't change if it's too light or dark it'll become extremely noticeable when the background changes now there are a couple ways to finesse this the first is by changing my lighting options to linear or interpolate this allows mocha to guess the lighting based on a previous frame as I mentioned before these options are we used for removals without a clean plate this is when mocha is scanning ahead to insert a background however for subtle changes in lighting they can be very helpful another option and one that I used here is actually to simply break the clip into two separate shots around the point where she moves into shadow this way I can use a separate clean plate for when she's in the light and when she's in the shadow regardless when I'm done with this I'm gonna save my After Effects project and it'll automatically update in the premiere timeline the great thing is that if I'm working with multiple shots they're all stored in the same After Effects project if I'm rewatching my footage and spot an issue I can always jump right back into that project and make quick adjustments and that's all there is to it if you'd like to see the completed scene from staying in Boston check out the link below I'm Ben mori Ali with Boris effects and for more great tutorials don't forget to check out the Boris effects website take care

Channel: Boris FX Learn

Views: 46,886

Keywords: Mocha Tracking, How to Remove a logo, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere, Boris FX, mocha Pro, planar tracking, tutorial, object removal, Remove Module

Id: gH0R9NBJ0cI

Length: 9min 45sec (585 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 13 2017