Best way to key out / keying out burning paper transition (flames/smoke)

Question

Hi, my client needs to key out the 'hole' created through a piece of burning paper, in order to make a transition to reveal an image/footage underneath. The issue is that the footage was shot on a black background (NOT green screen). Still image below:

I have tried using different Keying effects in After Effects, but I can't seem to be able to separate the hole from the darker areas on the paper. Also, the flames appear as solid, not transparent. See image below:

After doing various tests, the only way I can see that will work is to rotoscope around the hole to create a mask by hand, frame by frame. And then, overlay a luminance matte of the fire. Like so:

Obviously this is hugely time consuming, so I was wondering if anyone had any better (faster) solutions to this problem? Thanks! 🙂

Mylenium · Answer

Yeah, you pretty much answered your own question. There might be a slim chance that there is some info that can be isolated via the red and green channels using channel operations, since the brown would not be full black, but even that would very likely require additional masking to mend holes and all that. It's simply going to be a roto job, though a few seconds of footage doesn't really sound that challenging. People just seem to be too afraid of this these days when the "magic" tools like Rotobrush or keying don't work...

Mylenium

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded