Hey team,
I’m trying to remove a drone from a 360 shot. It’s not moving heaps so I need to create a clean plate for it. That’s all good, I can do that in photoshop and it’s all fine. But the remove mask around the drone has a hard edge and you can see a line going around the mask line from the content aware fill used in photoshop (looks fine in photoshop because it’s a larger area). Is there a way to add a feather to the mask used in the remove module? I think with a little feather you wouldn’t be able to notice it. I see there are edge properties but from my testing it doesn’t look like that’s making any difference.
Supplementary question. Am I able to do a removal and reorient in the same session and render them both out together? Ie have the input layer on the reorient tab being the output from the remove tab. And if that’s the case do I need to render them between each step or could I just do a master render at the end and it’d be calculating both the reorient and the removal at the same time?
Supplementary supplementary question - when you do a render in Mocha what codec is it rendering to? Is it lossy? So if I do a chain like above, am I loosing data between each render. And are the renders just stored in the cache so it’ll dump them at some point? And one more question kinda linked to that - do I need to do a render in mocha, before going to export the rendered clip? Or can I go export rendered clip and it renders everything at the same time?
I’m using it as a OFX plugin from Mistika so looks like I can’t just save the project and do the render in after effects like the after effects plugin can.
Sorry that’s a lot of questions. Let me know if it doesn’t make sense.
Use a wide edge feather like you’re already doing. this will help blend the remove patch into the existing background
Use a Blend to blend the frames. Depending on the size of your footage i’d recommend a blend of about 30, but try different values.
Depending on the shift in light, you may also need to use illumination modelling, esepcially if you’re using clean plates.
If you’re in the plugin these have to be done separately. All workflow is done via the image cache in the plugin unless you specifically export the renders to disk. I’d recommend doing one workflow (for example remove), then render that sequence, then apply Mocha to the rendered clip and do the Reorient. This saves a lot of time, even though Reorient is quite fast to render.
The image cache is rendered to a lossless format that is the same bit-depth as the input source so you can warp and unwarp without artifacts.
Essentially yes. If you render inside Mocha the cache is not stored, so you have two options:
Render the Mocha timeline first then export Render Clips to disk from the file menu
Render the output from the host and save that to disk.
I’d recommend doing it from Mocha, especially if it’s a large or long footage sequence. Mocha tends to render faster inside the GUI compared to the host, as the host needs to send information to Mocha, then Mocha needs to output the render back.
Rendering to the host is obviously more convenient, but we provide both options for flexibility.
Hey @dhtbrowne! Martin was faster than me on this one, but just to add to his answer.
Sure you can add feathering! You should use Edge Properties for that, I recently showed just that in Office Hours. You can check the section around 15 minutes here, or here’s another video on that topic from the Mocha Essentials series
To render straight from Mocha GUI, follow to File/Export Render Clip, and from that you can render either to an image sequence, or to a movie file in ProRes codec. Then you use this file to do the Reorient work as a second step.
I would rather suggest using the "Static Scene " mode in the remove module and not actually tracking the drone, as i assume it mostly stays in the relatively same place. That way, the patched area will not dance around.
Add some more feathering to the edges, and also try using the Interpolate Illumination model in the Remove module. I’m showing this in the livestream I’ve attached above, around the 54 minute timestamp.
The illumination mode fixed it thanks. Unfortunately I need to track the drone - I was having challenges stablising the footage in Mocha (it’d be mostly there, but every now and again I’d get a little jump with a funky track which I couldn’t work out how to fix - even put the min pixels used to 100% and it was still jumping). Anyway in the end I used the gyro data from the camera inside mistika and that did a pretty good stablise. But then it means in the drone removal I need to track the drone because it moves around. Potentially I could do the drone removal first, but the gyro data is embedded into the original video clips so not sure how I’d extract it any other way.
thanks. Unfortunately I need to track the drone - I was having challenges stablising the footage in Mocha (it’d be mostly there, but every now and again I’d get a little jump with a funky track which I couldn’t work out how to fix - even put the min pixels used to 100% and it was still jumping). Anyway in the end I used the gyro data from the camera inside mistika and that did a pretty good stablise. But then it means in the drone removal I need to track the drone because it moves around. Potentially I could do the drone removal first, but the gyro data is embedded into the original video clips so not sure how I’d extract it any other way.