How to properly hide features applied to original video?

[indievituum]

Hello everybody. I'm trying to make a young woman older on the video. I made her older  taking cheeks of an old woman etc. from that and applied to the video. However, she is shaking her head, opening her mouth reading a poem and due to that my editing gets too obvious. I used face tracking and all the features are shaking in the same way, but anyway looks too unnatural. What could you recommend in this case?

[Dave Merchant]

After Effects' face tracking system is pretty basic, it's designed to identify regions for adjustment (e.g. to change eye color) and to transfer information into Character Animator (so the face motion drives a virtual puppet). It is not designed to "skin" a face with a replacement copy - it's simply not accurate enough and only sees the world in 2D. It cannot cope with heads turning, hair moving, phonemes, teeth reveals, etc.

If you have a trivial scene (e.g. a face staring directly into camera and frowning) then it's just about possible to morph a matching photo to fit using a mountain of puppet pins or the auto-generated reference points from face tracking "detail" mode, but even on a simple shot linking the pins and painting in all the detailed stuff like wrinkles and shadows so it looks "real" is a huge amount of work. The best you'll get is something that looks like a man in a rubber mask.

If you have a budget then it's done in CGI using a ZBrush model or point-scanned head tracked onto the original in true 3D space - not something AE can do - or with a GAN neural network (a topic that became briefly infamous last year and further discussion of the software involved is not permitted here). If you have no budget it's done with makeup at a reshoot.

[Mylenium]

Unless you want to dabble in "deep fakes" software based on machine learning, there is no easy way to achieve that. That's ultimately the point - due to the muscle and bone structure and that "uncanny valley" thing human faces are extremely hard to manipulate. You might want to check out some "digital de-aging" techniques as used on films to get an idea how complex this can become. Other than all that computer-based stuff simply consider hiring a good make-up artist and reshooting the whole thing. Depending on how young or old your lady is and what physique she has, this can look quite convincing. Simple stuff like darkening the cheeks to make them look more bony and all that, you know...

Mylenium