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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

wire removal tool/trick???

C

Craig Schober

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ok. i've got this long monologue shot (3:30) at the end of a feature we shot on my red one all 4k 16:9. i'm editing in fcp and grading in color with final output at 1080 prores. there are no reshoots but there are 8 other takes, all clean but performance isn't nearly as good in any as this one take. see if you can spot the problem. hint: soundpeople will see it first.

my question: is there a tool or trick (possibly in color or a fcp plug-in) that will remove or camouflage this lav wire at the bottom of the shirt easily or does something like this require frame by frame "painting" by a skilled fx person?

another question: is it even that noticeable or distracting? remember, this is a long monologue with only one brief cut in the middle. we see our character in this frame for at least 3 minutes and about 30 seconds of that we can see the wire too. the freeze i picked is probably the most prominent that the wire appears.

thanks in advance for your time and help.
wire.jpg
 
I normally rotoscope this sort of stuff out, but you might be able to blur it or isolate that section/color with a mask and lighten it. But for me- I would do cloning/rotoscoping.
 
Tracking the (I assume) moving wire is going to be the trick. I'd use Mocha for this job, but as Christopher said, the fastest fix (not best) is just to comp something in front of it. Or since you shot at 4K, you could always crop it.
 
Julio Quintana said:
If I had to choose between the wire or poorly done touchups, I would leave the wire.
Click to expand...

This.

No doubt at some point in the several hour long process that either you or an unlucky compositor would endure, you would find yourself questioning if it was worth it anyway.
 
If you're looking for a "good enough" solution, you could probably combine CC Bend It and Simple Wire removal in After Effects (Bend It-->Wire Removal-->Bend It to unbend it). A combination of motion tracking and brute-force keyframing could solve this problem in a few hours or less, although the combination of the wire and its shadow makes it twice the work.... A bigger issue is that this shot is at least three stops underexposed, of course.
 
Correct solution - use a tool like Mokey.

Hack solution - you could even do this in FCP - but you basically patch it from your existing good pieces. the lower part of his abdomen shading could be moved to the upper part where the wire is. The upper left part of his skin could patch the lower part. Takes a whole tremendous lot amount of frame by framing though.
 
thanks for all of your responses.

i forgot to mention a few things...

the entire movie is handheld including this shot making simple compositing of an object in front of him or part of the frame a tedious frame by frame issue.

we got the film in the can for under $15,000 making expensive post production fixes seem out of balance with the rest of the film.

right now i am leaning towards a re-crop if the director agrees or just leaving it in there or just pick another take. the jpeg i posted was an uncorrected raw still so i still have some room to play with grading but i don't see a good grading path that will help disguise it much more at this point.
 
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