I’ve got a bunch of shots to get through on a series and I’ve been asked to remove the flyaway hairs, they’re not bothered about the messiness of the hair only the flyaways thankfully.
The main issue is these are over a heavily textured bg, I’ve had a search but struggling to find any techniques which have been posted before. My method is going to be creating a bg plate and rotoing the head back in but was wondering if there’s any other techniques anyone could recommend?
I’m unable to post the footage but it’s along the lines of hair in front of a brick wall while someone is smoking next to them!
That sounds pretty gnarly, and I’m not sure one of my go-to’s would work on that texture, but maybe try Median Filter or crok_median. With some BG’s, this can zap the fine hair while maintaining the BG decently.
Seems like it may work well with the smoke, but maybe not with the brick.
What colors are the background? Is it all darker than the fly aways?
Last year I had a celebrity retouch with lots of fly aways over a wall of flower arrangements and lots of movement.
Taking a trick from Christoph’s fxphd class - make the bg plate with recursive ops, which erases all the fly away. Then just reveal the head + hair with a simple gMask. Great quality and pretty fast.
But only works if the background is static and darker than the hair.
While I didn’t use back then, doing the mask in Mocha (and using the mesh tracker - not for the mesh, but for how it works), can get your mask 90% there and then you just have to refine.
It’s blonde hair over a dark red brick wall so that could work quite nicely, I’ll give this a look and see where I get to.
Also using the mocha mesh is a good shout, the fg movement isn’t horrific. Might also give the machine learning head extraction a try for the matte. Lots of tools to get me hopefully 90% of the way there!
if the textured bkgd is static and you can stabilize the plate then you can average or median those fly aways into oblivion. unstablize and integrate the clean part back into the orig plate.
Yes. It is a tab inside of Mocha Pro. You can track the background, then do a mask around your removal item and Mocha will automatically patch the section. Sometimes it is much faster than taking your tracks back into flame to patch the area.
You can use to do lens distort/undistort and generating STMaps.
You have the aforementioned remove tool and also an insert tool that can be used to composite a foreground element right inside Mocha.
And a feature I haven’t used yet - the Megaplates, if you have background plates that far exceed your frame size due to camera movement.
And of course all the stabilization that goes with the tracking. One nice thing about the Mocha stabilizer is that it’s easy to do tracks that go out of frame. You track the entire range, and then can specify anchor frames throughout the track, and the stabilize interpolates between each set of anchor frames, rather than just the whole range. Very good for driving shots or massive pans.
And the mesh warp. Mocha is always a planar tracker, but with the mesh warp it can handle textures that are morphing while being mostly planar (facial features, skin, some products, etc.)
The remove tool could be considered a smart tool, pre-dates the current crop of ML tools, but also isn’t just a simple algorithm.
It tries to find neighboring frames in your tracking scope where the missing pixels exist and then fill them in and blend them.
Think of doing neighboring frame paint, except fully automated.
