Use Projected Plates To Clean Up Your Shot

Alexander Lehnert on May 15th 2012 with 9 comments

Tutorial Details

Requirements: After Effects and CameraTracker
Difficulty: Intermediate
Run Time: 30:23 min

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Final Product What You'll Be Creating

In this tutorial we´re going to adopt a fairly common technique used in 3d compositing tools such as Nuke. We will start off by tracking the shot using the After Effects CameraTracker plug-in by The Foundry to get our 3d Camera properly solved. With this data we extend this shot and create a clean plate, which we´ll use to project onto our “proxy geometry” to clean up the shot. We´ll build a fairly simple “projector rig” with some expressions to make life easier.

Tutorial

Download Tutorial .mp4

File size: 480.7 MB

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By Alexander Lehnert

Rollover to read this author's bio or click through to see a full list of posts by this author.

I'm a 25 yr old Germany-based VFX Generalist, working in the industry since 2007 after school. I'm working as Senior Compositor and Matchmoving Supervisor at Haus&Gross Communications GmbH at the moment working on international TV commercials, music videos, TV Shows and movies using AE, Nuke, Cinema4d and Syntheyes, as well as AE Camtracker on a daily basis.

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Shishir
NICEEE
http://vfxbyjames.info james whiffin
A very practical, useful tutorial. thanks.
conna
Thank you for sharing this wonderful tutorial with us !!
boran
results look very good, but I can’t download it because “http://blip.tv/file/get/Aetutsplus-CleanPlatesTutorial589.mp4″ is forbidden for my country, can anybody upload on another place like rapid share…
thx
http://www.exot.tv exot
realy great work.
for this specific cleanup i would prefer a planar tracking. is there any reason why you use a matchmove technique?i would just track the elec.pieces in moacha and export its transform data. copy the data 2 null object inside ae and delete the keyframes from the anchapoint.parent the clean plate to the null. this even works for re creating liddle camera movements by clicking “align surface”

http://www.alexander-lehnert.com Alexander Lehnert
Author
thank you all for the kind words! really great to see you guys liking the tut.
exot: i totally agree with you that in THIS case mocha would probably have been the best/fastest way to come up with a proper solution. However its all about learning new techniques. I didn’t have any other plate i could have shared with you so i needed to take this one.
On a shot i worked on lately i had to cleanup markers from the floor, sidewalls, back wall and a front wall with a door, that we were looking through. in those cases this technique gets quite more valuable. you don’t need to create a track for all those walls, you just do your 3d track , paint your clean plate and start projections…
hope that clears things a little up :) if there are questions left, don’t hesitate to ask again!
cheers,
alex

Maui
As you also use Syntheyes:
would any of the steps you mention be different when using Syntheyes?

http://www.alexander-lehnert.com Alexander Lehnert
Author
hey maui,
sorry for the late response, i was buried with work and got few deadlines to cope with…
i this technique works great with syntheyes using the *.ma export function in Syntheyes… did that on several projects in the past and it worked like a charm.
only thing you have to keep an i onto is scaling, but for most of the times that should be quite good and ready to roll!
cheers,
alex