remove dark objects from sunset

[oysterfeet]

Hi there,

Beginner in AE so please be gentle.

On holiday I made a classic sunset timelapse. Some beautiful colour shifts.

Workflow: Brought photos in Premiere and created an MP4 for AE to work with. 

Problem: A couple of boats move around in the foreground and is distracting from the beautiful scenery change, so I'd like to remove them.

Tried two different things:

1) Content aware fill. This doesn't get the horizon right, so I get water "in the sky".

2) Roto brushing the boat, and move the duplicated scenery across to cover in a layer beneath. This works better but creates hard edges. Some kind of feathering/blending would be good. Haven't even considered the colour adjustments in this approach.

It would be easy to remove the boats using Photoshop, but with hundreds of photos to edit, this is not workable.

Any suggestions?

[davidarbor]

RotoBrush has options to refine the edges, as well as a separate "Refine Edge" tool, but I would give Content Aware Fill another try. Have you created a reference frame in Photoshop? If you're not familiar with that process check out this article: https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/content-aware-fill.html

But in short, you can send a specific frame (as many as you want, actually) to Photoshop to clone in yourself. Once you save that After Effects uses that reference to base it's CAF on. If you feel like the fill generation works for a bit then starts to get wacky, you can create another reference frame; it's a pretty powerful feature.

[Mylenium]

Don't bother with any of that new-fangled nonsense like Rotobrush or Content Aware Fill. Import the image sequence, Track the boats using the conventional 2D tracker, apply the data to a layer duplicate which you mask with a slight featherand shift into place by adjusting the anchor point. Rinse repeat as often as needed. This will retain your horizon line and other details. just be aware that you may not be able to track very long segments and may need to correct the tracker quite a bit every few frames, but its definitely going to be quicker than painting out stuff in PS still.

Mylenium