For two weeks, I have been editing footage to remove the actors arm and remaking whatever would have been behind it. This has been a very tedious and difficult job. Last week I was easily able to completely mask out the arm, but naturally this left a large arm shaped gap in his body as it crosses over. This last week was the far more difficult part, rebuilding his body behind it. I tried a series of methods to find the most efficient and best looking manner of recreating the lost areas of footage only to have all of them fail until I went back to the basics. Using morphing tools and motion paths in After Effects, I couldn't get a fluid and realistic looking transition as his cloth and fringe moved. The most efficient and best looking method turned out to be recreating the body frame by frame using Photoshop and its animation tools. Using the information from framed before and after the arm passes over a section of the body, I could recreate what needed to be there. I had to make some assumptions of the flow of his clothing by carefully studying the footage.
Here is the original video captured running at 24 fps.
The same video after I edit out the arm.
Here you can see the result of this method. All in all I was able to do a decent job of removing his arm from the footage. Although there are some minor jitters, specifically toward the end with the yellow fringe, these areas should smooth themselves out when the video is run through the Optical Flow effect to slow the footage down.
No comments:
Post a Comment