Is This the Right Approach?

tnw2933 wrote on 10/2/2006, 9:36 AM

I need the help of the editing experts on the Forum with a problem in a recently edited Vegas 7 project. The video project is a piano recital held in an auditorium. The wall behind the artist and piano are a light beige color. Behind the pianist, and visible throughout virtually all of the video, is an electrical receptacle and a switch panel (both almost black). It is annoying to see these behind the pianist throughout much of the video. Here is the approach I thought I would try to remove thee undesirable objects in the video.

(1) Place a copy of the main recital video clip just below the original recital video clip in the project.

(2) Use Track Motion to follow the movement of outlet/switch in both the top and bottom clips. The camera was not moved during the video but occasioanlly was zoomed a bit so the outlet/switch move some in the video frame and occasionally change in size with the camera zoom.

(3) Use the Cookie Cutter Tool to cut out just enough of the top video to remove the outlet. This will leave a transparent hole in the top video through which the bottom clip will be seen. I will key frame the Cookie Cutter tool if the outlet/switch increases in size during the zooms.

(4) Offset the bottom video so that the wall near the outlet is visible but not the outlet. Track motion should keep both the top clip and the bottom clip positioned so that the transparent hole in the top clip is always replaced by a section of wall near the outlet.

Does this approach sound feasible? Would you take a different approach?

Thank you in advance for any advice or comments that you could give to me.

Tom

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 10/2/2006, 10:11 AM

That's pretty much exactly what i would do. Use a little bit of feathering on the cookie cutter and it should look very good. You will need to do a lot of tweaking during zooms though. If you merely duplicated the track motion between the two tracks then there will be some offset movent of the wall relative to the cookie cutter hole. It may be near impossible to eliminate it unless you keyframe every single frame during the zooms. However, you may get it close enough to be unnoticeable rather easily.

I would suggest setting keyframe smoothness to 0.000 before adding any keyframes. This will make your task much easier.

tnw2933 wrote on 10/2/2006, 10:59 AM

Chienworks,

Many many thanks for responding and for the additonal advice. I shall certainly do as you suggest. This is pretty much uncharted territory for me so the results will be interesting. Thank you again.

Tom