Mocha VEGAS: Cleanup - Use VEGAS Pro to do Object Removal VFX

to follow along download projects and footage from our training area at borisfx.com in this video we will learn how to make a car disappear with the help of MoCA Vegas [Music] any cleanup work requires two vital things a good track and a good Clean Plate a good track is not even a question when you have mocha but what is a Clean Plate and where do you get it a Clean Plate is basically a steel frame without the object that you need to remove from your main clip if you are lucky you may have it shot in a set by a crew member or with a fixed supervisor but most likely you got to be creating it yourself you can use Photoshop or any other photo editing software and that's what my original plan for this shot was but then I realized that we really can finish the shot without leaving Vegas Pro at all but anyways any shot starts with the track so let's dive into mocha a common misunderstanding that beginners have is that if you want to remove a thing you should track a thing and that's not quite always the case sure if you want to remove this car we would track it to have a track mat but what you really should be focusing on is what is behind the object that you try to remove because this is what you're gonna be replacing it with in this shot I really only care about the accurate ground track that said I wouldn't get that before excluding any distractions so I'd start with creating a really rough shape around the car to mask it out I don't really care about the accuracy for the car track so I can draw it like this even though that would include two different player surfaces I would just adjust my shape as the check goes cool another potential distraction we have here is not so obvious but if you look closely you'll notice this large shadow that could also throw our track off so I would create another shape for that and Link it to the car layer using guess what link the track now let's figure out the ground it is not as flat as I would like it to be we have these bumps and bushes but it still can be considered as one plane we are mostly interested in this area where the car drives by that is more or less flat so we should be fine to track it I will just draw my spline a little bit more carefully trying to avoid these big bushes and inconsistencies something like this for convenience let's change the spline color to Green rename that and put it below the car and the shadow layers also I need to make sure that the cook icon is turned off for both Shadow and car layers the Cog defines which layer you want to track we already have the data for car and the shadow now we want to track only the ground so I leave the cork enabled there let's also roughly set up the surface and to make that even easier I would enable the grid the grid really becomes handy when you try to align to a large surfaces like we have here this looks pretty accurate to me and I can temporarily disable that this is a pretty wide shot that has Parallax changes so to get a proper ground Jack we need to track it with the perspective turned on and let's give it a first shot now to check whether my track is good or not I would enable my grid back and scrub through the timeline the front part looks pretty solid to me but if you pay a close attention to the foreign you may notice that there is a pretty bad drift that usually happens when we did not give MoCA enough of the text transformation formation to figure out the correct perspective but let's see if we can fix it luckily we have this more or less flat area in the distance so we can add it to our track and see if it makes it any better and we can do that with the add explain tool yeah we use adexplan tool not only to make holes in our layers but also to add areas to our track now the spline that the draw will be created on the same layer and this area would be also added to our tracking region and let's try it one more time the track is finished I'll bring the grid back to see if that made any difference and we definitely have an improvement on this far end now we are fine with the track we can move to the next stage to make a Clean Plate we would need to take a different parts of an image from a different frames and combine it into one patch here is what I mean we can take this area from the first frame to cover the car when it moves to this spot on the last frame and vice versa now this area is free and we can take it to cover the car on the first frame that's quite an easy task when the camera is static but we have a moving one so we need to somehow align these two frames one to each other instead of doing it manually in Photoshop or any other photo editing software there is a trick you can do in mocha to perfectly align these frames in a few clicks we already have a perfect track of the ground we just need to utilize the data properly it would be somewhat similar to setting up a reference frame as we did in the mochavex stabilization video so if you missed that go check that out remember that the surface is not your track data but just the representation of it and as long as we have a good track we can realign it however we want basically if you want to align this area from the first frame to the same spot on the last frame we need to make our surface fill the entire screen on the first frame you don't need to do it manually we have a special button for it now if I scrap through the surface would look really weird but you'll get why we need that in a sec at this point we can get back to Vegas now let's figure out how we can apply it so we know that we set our first frame to be the reference in order to make a patch that would be automatically aligned to all other frames we need to apply the track data to the still image of the first frame to export a steel image from Vegas click on this button right above the viewer just make sure that your preview quality is set to best before you save the file so I would call that frame 1 and save it as a file then it would be automatically added to your project place it on a timeline over your main clip now I would go into the mocha parameters of the footage and apply the track data for the ground to the still image that we've just created now I would solo this layer and play it back looks a bit trippy right everything gets distorted but if you focus your attention on this row that we were tracking you can see that it stays mostly in the same place as I toggle on and off the layer so we do not need to manually align the frames to make a Clean Plate mocha just did it for us so what I need to do now is cut only this middle section from our top layer to overlap the car on the last frame of our clip and for that I would use just the default native Vegas mask because it doesn't really need to be animated or tracked we'll just draw a shape on one frame I open pan and crop window for my still image enable this mask checkbox then select the end Recreation tool and draw a shape around the desired region just like this right after I close the shape we'll immediately see the result in a viewer on our distorted frame so I can adjust it as needed if some parts of the car are still visible and don't forget to add a little bit of feather and I'm pretty fine with how it looks but that's only the one frame let's check that in motion we obviously still have our car in the beginning of the clip and then it enters the area that we've patched we should fix the first part now now instead of creating another layer with another patch for the beginning of the clip we can save the last frame that we've just created and that would literally be a clean plate so I click on the snapshot button again and now I would save my file as Clean Plate it has been added to our project so I'll drag it on my timeline and place it instead of the steel frame that we had before I can delete that we don't need it anymore okay we have our track we have our Clean Plate how this is gonna work we basically need to do the same thing as we did while creating The Clean Plate we just need to reset the surface in mocha and change the reference frame from the first one to the last one as this is the one that we use as a Clean Plate now inside Moga I select my ground layer then check if the playhead is located on the last frame and expand the surface and that's it this is how surface looks now we can close mocha and apply this new data to our Clean Plate once data is applied our plate would look stretched like this but again we're only interested in this area in the center so I'll cut it with another Vegas mask the masking steps would be exactly the same go into pattern crop enable the mask choose the anchor creation tool and draw a shape of the patch it is really handy to have a preview updating right in the viewer while I'm adjusting the mask as it makes much easier to figure out the correct shape I check my results through various frames and if the car is still visible somewhere I just make the shape slightly bigger the feather could help to blend it better but don't go too crazy with it as you might get some gusting effects just a subtle amount would be enough let's check our result in motion and this is how you do a cleanup in Vegas in the next video we'll take that one step further and talk about some basic composting in Vegas prod join me there to learn more

Channel: Boris FX Learn

Views: 5,859

Keywords: Mocha, BorisFX, Boris FX, rotoscoping, planar tracking, motion tracking, vfx

Id: F19w71eJSK0

Length: 11min 7sec (667 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 17 2023