Pan & Crop mask

Don Leonard wrote on 12/2/2014, 11:07 AM
I have a weird situation -- shot a C/U interview with a woman several weeks ago and just realized while viewing the clip that the woman had an insect roaming around, in and out of her hair. It's not possible to re-shoot the interview so I've tried using the mask function in the Pan/Crop tool to isolate the bug as it moves, using the same clip on another track immediately below, slightly offset so that only hair shows through the masked area. It sort of works but it's not beautiful.

Can anyone offer ideas on how to deal with this problem using any of Sony's tool in Vegas 11?

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 12/2/2014, 11:20 AM
If the camera was locked down, and if the exposure is constant, you can use a difference mask. You simply create a mask from a frame where the bug is not in the background. There are lots of threads in this forum. Here is the original demo, done by a Sony programmer, a long time ago:

Cat Demo

This will remove the critter from the background. Getting rid of it while it is on the talent is a much more difficult proposition. Even with motion tracking, that will be tough.
Don Leonard wrote on 12/2/2014, 12:21 PM
The camera was locked down but the subject's head was moving as she spoke while the critter moved around in her hair. If she had been perfectly still, the pan/crop mask would have worked well but with all the movement, it's incredibly difficult to present a solution that's not obvious. I'll look into the solution you suggested but I'm not confident there's an acceptable fix.

Thanks for your suggestion.
johnmeyer wrote on 12/2/2014, 1:12 PM
If the bug is only on her hair, and is not flying around in the background, then my suggestion above is totally useless. As I said at the end of my earlier post, I don't think there is any method for removing something really small that is moving, especially over a textured background like someone's hair. Even motion tracking software is going to have a tough time "locking on" to a small bug.

With fixed, small spots, you can use the following technique. Perhaps it would work for the frames where the bug is not moving much:

Tech Diver wrote on 12/2/2014, 1:19 PM
If the fly is small enough (just a few pixels in size), you could use a third-party tool like BCC Pixel Fixer after it has been tracked. The tool uses information from the surrounding pixels to replace the bad ones.

Peter
Duncan H wrote on 12/2/2014, 11:30 PM
Hi, If you wanted to upload a short segment of the video file (e.g 10 secs) onto dropbox or similar, I'd quite like to see what might be able to be done with tracking and masking and happy to have a play.

Duncan