Object removal test.
Occasionally you need to remove something from your footage. You should always try to avoid the 'fix it in post' mentality, but sometimes it happens, so I've been playing with various tools and techniques. For fun, I wanted to see what it would take to remove the hand/phone coming into this BTS shot on a cell phone. No real need to remove it, other than curiosity.
The bulk of the removal was done with Mocha Pro, however, it left artifacts on 11 frames. I'm new to Mocha, so it's possible it could have handled it, but I couldn't get it to do it.
I used Twixtor to recreate those 11 frames based on the two good frames at either end that Mocha created, then used Hitfilm to track the shake in the original, and apply it to the frames Twixtor created.
I spent a lot of time 'playing' around with this, mostly trying to get Mocha to do the whole thing, which didn't work out, so it's hard to say how long something like this would take to do, but just guessing, if I was to start from scratch, it would probably take about 30 minutes, plus some render time.
https://vimeo.com/93340397
The bulk of the removal was done with Mocha Pro, however, it left artifacts on 11 frames. I'm new to Mocha, so it's possible it could have handled it, but I couldn't get it to do it.
I used Twixtor to recreate those 11 frames based on the two good frames at either end that Mocha created, then used Hitfilm to track the shake in the original, and apply it to the frames Twixtor created.
I spent a lot of time 'playing' around with this, mostly trying to get Mocha to do the whole thing, which didn't work out, so it's hard to say how long something like this would take to do, but just guessing, if I was to start from scratch, it would probably take about 30 minutes, plus some render time.
https://vimeo.com/93340397
Comments
As I mentioned, I spent a lot of time playing with it, trying to learn the ins and outs of Mocha. The 30 minutes is just a guess of how long it would take if I'd have known what I was doing before hand
Now that I know more about it, future stuff *should* be faster.
I wish I could take full credit for it. I remembered seeing a tutorial somewhere on twixtor of someone fixing a frame where a flash had gone off. Having also spent time 'playing' with twixtor, I was pretty sure it could handle it.
After fixing it with twixtor, it looked odd since all of the footage was shaky, except for the smooth 1/3 of a second twixtor fixed. Took no time at all to track the shakiness with Hitfilm and match it up.
Meant to mention, in most of my other tests that are not as extreme as this, Mocha Pro does an impressive job of removing things.
Here's what it looked like with just Mocha. There was a light change behind the one puppet (I think from the owner of the hand & phone) from before and after the phone coming into frame, plus the puppet moved a bit.
Between those two things, Mocha left some artifacts. It has a more advanced mode called interpolate that is supposed to do a much better job, but I could never get it to cooperate at all, plus it increased the render time a LOT.
https://vimeo.com/93448947
Getting it to that point in Mocha Pro would take 10-15 minutes.
Keep experimenting - I'll be interested to see what you discover next!