Compicated shot for removing a character

Hi Ok so I am hoping someone will be able to help me out here. In order to explain my problem a lot easier I have made a short video in which I show what the problem is.
If you have 2:30 minutes to spare please watch it and maybe you can provide me with some helpful tips. THX a lot in advance

Hi there,

You might be overthinking this shot.

1. Garbage Mask out your guy dragging on the ground and any shadows he's casting. Keep this as your top layer.
2. Garbage Mask out the guy dragging the corpse, not a lot of fine roto work to do. Just do a big loose matte. Keep this as your middle layer;
3. Track the background. Keep this as your bottom layer. You may need two background tracks, one for the ground and one for the hills.
4. Remove the guy dragging the corpse and do fine roto on the legs of the corpse where he's overlapping the guy who's dragging the corpse.

This will require a general large remove and then compositing the corpse back over the top, you won't nail this shot in one simple remove pass because of your complicated foreground object. You need to remove too much of the corpse and the guy dragging him, and then put him back over the top in a composite inside AE or Nuke for example using mocha roto. Just don't use fine roto for the remove.

Try that and let me know.

Cheers,
Mary

Ok I will try what you said ASAP. What I tried doing so far is this: I made a garbage mask around the two guys,a big one. Then I tracked the background on the sky and on the ground, but those tracks could not be done completely, I got an error saying what you can see in the pic. So I uses them up to the point they were tracked.

http://imgur.com/a/1WXAP

Sometimes the ERROR says something like there is to much difference in the lighting… or something like that.

Then I did the remove, and the two guys were mostly removed ok, with some tearing. My plan was to use this fully clean footage and place it above the Original in Ae and roto out around the area of the guy with the tracking markers, but this also gave me some bad results around the legs of the corpse guy… Well THX for the help, I will see what I can do.

You’re still tracking the two FG shapes when you track the background, turn off the gears for the top two layers so you’re not tracking them anymore and focus on getting good background tracks. The gears mean you’re tracking or rendering those layers in mocha.

Of you’re seeing tears, it’s because your BG track isn’t good enough. Turn your grid and surface tool on and really pay attention to what the track is doing.

Ok this makes a lot of sense. THX a lot I will see what I can do and I will post the end result I am thinking that maybe I need to make a Clean plate frame for the beginning of the video? Like in the second tutorial with the fish that does not move? Maybe?

You might need to, if you can’t see enough BG behind the characters.

Hi Ok so I have made a lot of progress with the removal tool THX to the info I got here, so thank you for that
But I still do not understand a few things, therefore I moved to a new shot that I have and I made a new video in which i explain what I do not understand.

So if you have 4 minutes of your time to spare to watch this video I would be happy… THX

I think the issue is you don’t have a good grasp on what “planar data” is. The sky is it’s own plane. The ground is actually several planes. Think of the shot in terms of a low poly model, a very low poly model. How would the environment look as a super low rez 3D model? The polygons are planes. Those are what you want for the best tracks.

When you say “the background track looks good” I can tell you even from not seeing the grid and surface tool (which you should be using to judge the track instead of the shape), no it doesn’t, it drifts with the clouds while anchored to the ground. That’s not ideal, but you get away with it in your render because you have a super feathered remove shape. You want the sky separate and the ground separate, and probably you want that FG hill bend to be separate as well. You will need to track perspective on the ground as well. That will give you a much more pixel perfect remove.

Your issue is not the remove, it’s not understanding the tracker and the relationship of that tracker to planar data. If you can grasp that concept, remove will be so much easier. That planar data is how the remove rebuilds the shot pixel by pixel.

Do you see what I mean?

Also, try overlapping BG shapes instead of joining the layers, you’ll get cleaner remove results. You won’t get that black line. If you still don’t see what I mean, send me the shot and I will show you. maryp@imagineersystems.com

Cheers,
Mary

Ok I will see what I can do, THX a lot for the info. I would rather learn and do this but if I fail after countless hours of trial and error I will send you the shot

Hi Ok so taking into account all that you have said. To track the ground I make a bunch of small window tracks, but what I want to know is: Do they need to last for the whole scene somehow? Or is it ok if a track last for a few seconds and then ends? After that I can use the Uber key to make them bigger so they cover more of the area and overlap?
And for the grid, the track is good if the grid does not get distorted in any way?
And for the Clean plate, do I have to make multiple cleanp lates along the way or can I use one that is a panorama that covers the whole scene but was not made in Mocha?

Think in real broad terms, not tiny window tracks.