Help! besides a flyswatter...

Yesterday morning I shot an interview in the lobby of a nice hotel by the San Francisco Bay. In the middle of a key soundbite, tight close up, a darn fly goes around the face of my subject; twice!
Any tips for masking out the critter? I'll appreciate it.

Alberto

Reshoot. Period.

Failing that, you could theoretically just roto it out. But if it goes in front of your talent, then that'll be annoying.

I'm reminded of that famous shot from "Raiders of the Lost Ark" where a fly crawls into Paul Freeman's mouth in the middle of his "blow it back to God" speech. And doesn't crawl back out. Spielberg kept it because it was such a good take.

Call a good motion graphics artist, get a good Starbucks credit, get Silhouette FX, and go for a long weekend in the Bahamas because that'll be the best weekend you will be able to afford for a long time once the bill comes back.



www.strypesinpost.com

Thanks a lot!
The reshoot is out of the question; it was at a conference and the subject's not easy to get again. Now I feel lucky the fly didn't land or got into my guest's mouth. She didn't noticed it and neither did I edited.
I'll look into Silhouette FX, and a special thought to Bahamas.

Alberto

Mocha for Final Cut Pro will work for this.
[www.imagineersystems.com]

Michael Horton
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cut away to the Golden Gate Bridge ... or the Bay Bridge

cut to another shot of him doing another line and make it work by lip synching the new scene

don't you have a medium shot or long shot -- cut that in and make the lip synch work again somehow.

if everything fails, do an insert of a hand catching the fly and smashing it against the wall or table. In a recent interview with Obama, he caught and killed a fly during the interview. The editor left it in!

Also, mix in the sound of a fly buzzing around ... if it's that kind of interview, you know what I'm saying?

reshoot? bah!

masking out a little fly is really not that hard.

when you say "goes around" i'm optimistically thinking it circles the face

the trickiest part will be the few frames it goes in front of the talent's face,
because 1) we the audience would be looking directly in that area,
and 2) there's a lot of detail in a human face.

nevertheless it wouldn't take much effort these days to cover that up.
back in 1981 maybe, but in 2009 i could do it on my iMac.

if you mean it sits on the face and walks around and around, then yes that would be harder,
but still wouldn't take too long for a skilled compositor to fix.

but seeing your reply "I feel lucky the fly didn't land" i think it's the former.
you don't need roto,
you can do this with the tools in FCP.

use the mask shape and mask feather filters t create a small matte that will "Cover" the fly.
this will cut a hole in the shot.
then you just have to find similar parts of the face and bg to fill the hole.

for the face, as the fly is probably moving pretty fast, you may well be able to use adjacent frames.
or possibly you'd have to look for similar mouth / eye movements from elsewhere.

if you think you can get away with adjacent frames, you could use the free Too Much Too Soon "Hair Removal" filter. Iv'e been using that for some dust-busting, zero-ing in on small, and not so small, blobs.
it's got mask, feather, and sample (next or previous frame) all in one filter.


good luck,
nick

Quote

you don't need roto, you can do this with the tools in FCP. use the mask shape and mask feather filters t create a small matte?

Just for the record ? that is roto.

seems like a stretch to me.
rotoscoping, to me, is drawing around an object, creating ether an animated version, or a complex moving mask.
i wouldn't put keyframing a move on a simple mask shape into the same category.

but so as to not prolong the issue,
let's say you don't need roto SOFTWARE to do this fix.


nick

Of course you need rotoscoping software to do rotoscoping work. It's just that Final Cut Pro includes very rudimentary rotoscoping tools. The "Mask Shape" effect is the most rudimentary rotoscoping tool possible. I wouldn't use it myself, since it's far too fiddly and difficult to use compared to just drawing and keyframing a bezier in Nuke or what have you, but in this case "crappy" is the price you pay for "convenient," and maybe that's good enough.

But just to be clear, this is rotoscoping, and you do need rotoscoping tools to do it, and the quality of the job done modulo the time spent doing it will depend on the tools you use.

my guess is you could mask out that fly in FCP before you'd downloaded and installed some other bit of software,
certainly before you'd finished reading the "getting stated" pages of the manual.

but really, creating the mask is the easy part,
most likely the time-consuming part is finding the "Fill"

it'd be a frame by frame operation.

speaking of the mask,
yes, the mask shape filter can be fiddly,
if the fly is streaking across the frame you would be better of using the 4-point garbage matte,
if it's a curved streak, then maybe 8-point.

the "Hair removal" filter i mentioned handles a straight line elegantly.
you define two points, it draws a "line" mask with rounded edges that you can fatten to taste.
you can add two instances to cope with a curved line.
i've done that to remove a kinky hair from a frame.

thinking more about the fix, i'm wondering if the footage is interlaced or not.
progressive would make it easier, as you'd be dealing with single images.

if it is interlaced, it might be worth slowing to 50% speed, making each field a discrete frame.
then you'd do the work, and re-interlace.... somehow.
i know Graeme Nattress has a re-interlace filter. i'm guessing it could be for this sort of thing.


in the end, it may not be a perfect fix,
but it could just register as something odd like a fleeting shadow or light effect,
which would be less disturbing than a pesky fly


nick

Thanks to all!

I'll go with Nick's suggestions. Hey, we're FCP users so i'll use it's tools. I'll try the garbage mask.

Alberto

Good luck.



www.strypesinpost.com

First show I delivered for broadcast - a Christmas concert. Halfway through the show, a bat starts flying around inside the concert hall. I had to do all sorts of mattes, reversing footage, and all kinds of weird things. The 8 pt matte was my best friend on those long nights.

Oh if only it could've been a Halloween show.