How to remove an object from moving hands?

[dont_bugm85537889]

Hello all,

I have a video of a reporter holding a super long sandwich, with both arms, horizontally in front of his chest. Then the reporter lifts the sandwich up over his head before putting it down on a table.

My question is, Is it possible to remove the sandwich? If yes, how?

Thank you so much!

[Rick Gerard · Accepted solution]

Here is what you need to know and have or create to pull off a shot like that and where you can get a little info on how to do it.

Things you need:

• Layers made up of at least 2 copies of the original footage
• A Clean Plate of the area behind the hands when you want the sandwich do disappear
• A Clean Plate the empty hands
  note: A Clean Plate is a footage or a still image that does not have the object you are trying to remove from the scene. If you are removing the sandwich when the hands are above the reporters head then you can use a still frame from before the hands get over the head may work for this if there is nothing happening in the background. The empty hands are more problematic unless you did some pre-production and visual effects planning and shot a duplicate shot with the hands in basically the same position and no sandwich. If you do not have that footage then you are stuck with hand painting or cloning to replace the hands.

Skills you will need:

• Rotoscoping or Rotobrush to separate the hands from the background - you only need to roto the frames of hands and part of the arms where the sandwich is supposed to be missing. you put the Clean Plate below the hands' layer to hide the sandwich
• Motion Stabilize - to make rotoscoping easier
• Know how to put the motion back in the shot after rotoscoping
• Mattes, masking, and Track Mattes
• Tracking and masking in Mocha AE may help you project, it all depends on the shot
• Motion tracking to attach the clean plate to the background if the camera is moving
• Matte cleaning skills and plug-ins to help with the edges of the rotoscoped layers
• Color grading skills to clean up any problems with the Clean Plate Plate (shadow removal for example

Where to find training:

• Rotoscoping and Rotobrush are tedious tools to use so you need to look at some tutorials. The Search Help field at the top right corner of AE is a good place to start. Here is a really basic introduction to Rotoscoping a shot that has been motion stabilized:
  
  That should give you the basic idea of how to set up a manual roto job and create a track matte.
• Motion Stabilize and Motion Tracking are also pretty well explained in the help files
• Color grading - same procedure, check the help files.

Your biggest potential problem comes from inadequate preproduction planning so you do not have the Clean Plates you need and the shot was not planned with Rotoscoping in mind.

There are some decent tutorials on sites like Video CoPilot that will show you parts of this procedure. I'm not going to point them all out to you. I'll just warn you than about half of the tutorials I have seen on YouTube have been prepared by amateurs that do not really know what they are doing and they present incomplete, inefficient and in many cases, dead-end workflows that do you no good in the long run. You have to vet your trainers.

Show us the footage and we can be more specific. It no effort was made to shoot the footage in a way that would make it easier to remove the sandwich you may end up having to do your best to fool the audience by making them look somewhere else for a few frames.

[Mathias Moehl]

This tutorial might also help:

Tutorial WikiLeak Removal - Get your Job in Censorship Business

In the tutorial I remove a part of a newspaper that I hold in my hand. This is probably a bit simpler than removing the sandwich but might give you some general ideas how to approach this kind of task.