Eliminate edges of stage costumes in post production

[samuele2239547220a9]

Hi, I need an idea to overcome a very difficult problem, I work in the theater and I have to deal with actors who wear human skin masks to get effects of humanoids or other creatures, the problem is that these costumes have borders on the belly or on the face that I would like to eliminate, unfortunately we cannot always use make-up or clothes to cover them and to solve the problem I did the following: I duplicated the sequence and made the second sequence blurred enough to merge the actor's skin with that of the costume always skin color, then with the masks I traced the areas where the edges passed, erasing them completely, the system has worked so far but it is very stressful and sometimes complex to apply because the shades often come out of the edges blurring other points revealing the post-production make-up, others sometimes they shine too much and you notice, I wonder if there is a system always in post production to do it: I repeat that I would like to discuss only of digital solutions we can not afford anything else on the set unfortunately, thanks in advance

 

 

   

[Mylenium]

Well, perhaps you simply need to change you approach to your costumes. You know, there's a reason why the Cirque du Soleil almost exclusively puts their artists in full body suits even if they show "skin". Crop tops/ cleavage belts apparently just don't cut it. Just sayin'... Other than that there's really no good answer. No matter what tools you are going to use afterwards, you'll always have to draw masks and even worse, you won't get away with your crude polygonal ones. You have to take a much more refined approach to the matter like in serious roto work and properly delineate the areas to process. That would also allow to use some mask tracking when there's actually proper edges to detect. After that you can easily use content aware fill, adaptive blurs (Surface Blur, Bidirectional Blur or tools like RevisionFX' SmoothKit) plus of course any combination of paint tools, additional masking and so on. Anyway, your statement about "we can not afford anything else" makes no sense to me. You're working your fingers off on something for hours what equates to hundreds of dollars when the real answer is likely spending 50 bucks on a flesh colored ballet suit/ leotard for the actors/ dancers.

Mylenium

[samuele2239547220a9]

thanks for the reply, I was trying to look for some plugins on aescripts but to no avail, I tried with RE: Vision the blur effects look slightly better, I also thought of using green markers above the costume stripes to make a simpler but not tracing I know how much it can solve in terms of time, unfortunately when I say we can not afford anything else it is because there are no costumes without borders, we cannot use whole costumes because they would not work with the foreseen scenes, it is not a problem of money but of technique, we thought we would use even a coating such as paint or paste but it would be too long each time to do the job and also would not return a good effect, so the only one is digital 😄 i hope to find some script to do something

[ShiveringCactus]

Are the backgrounds always strongly constrasted like in your shots?  If so, you might be able to pull an inverted luma mask to cut out the edges.  Failing that the rotobrush is pretty good to cutting out individuals and failing that, I've done a fair amount of animated garbage masks like this.  The secret is to find a good podcast series and make adjustments every 3 - 5 frames.

[samuele2239547220a9]

i dont understand very well what you want say, can you show me better?

[samuele2239547220a9]

now i understand what you say... mmm can you advice some good effects to blur? because in standards blur after effects are not very good for borders