what about a tutorial specific about wire removal.
I’ve seen many tuts on Remove module, but no one about wires. There are a funny Quick look tutorial with many examples but it was not a tutorial but simply a presentation about Remove module skills. Wire removal is also one of the most diffuse techs used in VFX and I think it could be a great idea to make a tuts specifically focused on this argument.
If you have footage I can use, I will absolutely make a wire removal tutorial, but getting the footage is like pulling teeth. We have some very simple wire removals from a few years ago, but they’re a little old on the interface side.
Hi Mary, any luck on the wire removal tutorial.
Basically we are looking for a complex wire remove tutorial from mocha. We generally follow frame by frame roto paint techniques and wondering if mocha can be a boon in such tasks… Thanks again
Alas, that footage was unsuitable. If you have footage we can use I can see. I basically need the footage to make a tutorial, and I don’t shoot a lot of action scenes (like at all).
I have some nice footage of a person suspended on wires floating under water. It has some good challenges. Let me ask if I can share it with you. I did the wire removal in Fusion several years ago, but would love to see how to do it easier in Mocha. Source footage is 8K RED.
Unfortunately the answer was no. A dichotomy - they want the results, but are too nervous to enable the evolution of the craft. It isn’t really a secret that wires are used to achieve the shots, and knowing it doesn’t take away from the art and the results. But it is what it is.
I guess some purpose footage would have to be shot, though I’d be keen to see it real world examples with occlusions, moving parts, change exposure/color, blurs, etc. not the simple case of a static wire on a relatively static object.
That’s the problem we run into often, people want the knowledge themselves but they don’t want to share it with anyone else, which is not how our tutorials work of course ;). We are working on shooting something we are going to try to show the concept on. Thank you.
I think that is ultimately what is needed for high quality footage. Let me know if there’s something I can help with. I work both in the post and camera departments and have access to resources. NYC based.
It’s a pretty simple example, I grant you, but it might be useful. It was shot @ 3.5K and is in Prores 4444 format, I believe. I’d have to dig out the archive.
If you think it’d be useful, Jan, please let me know.
Some of the most complex wire removal paint jobs involve expensive rigs from professional companies so its really hard to re-create that level of shot complexity in your back garden.
Like this one:
I don’t have any source footage unfortunately at the moment, but if anyone was interested an easy thing you can do to recreate yourself is to tie a wire to a hand held object as if you was holding a weapon and get someone else to pull it hard so it flies out your hand. Do it outside on a windy day and have the camera person run towards you or something and you should have a decent paint job on your hands to rebuild the actor & BG with a combination of frame by frame painting & tracked patches using both Mocha & Silhouette probably. I did it once a long time ago & it worked pretty well. Phone’s these days have solid cameras. If that’s your idea of fun anyway!
This is a great thread. I think one of the Mocha teams’ struggles for advanced training has been to present Mocha Pro for the complex wire removal shots that also require paint and patch (and manual time). Many users want shorter tutorials… and we tend to focus on issues that Mocha 100% handles.
For example, when removing wires in front of stunt people (especially faces) are types of shots where solution almost always requires some frame painting.
Now that we have Silhouette as a product with excellent paint tools, we definitely would like to address more difficult project examples. The key is to show where the manual frame-by-frame work is required but also to make that digestible for users.
Exactly what I would be looking for. Basic wire removal most users can figure out, but when it gets into the advanced situations, that’s where it’s really helpful watching someone who has mastered it. I love Silhouettes’s paint node and use it all the time. But it takes a lot of know-how and practice to master.
One of the biggest pitfalls you can end up in, is to be over-confident. You’ve done VFX work, a client asks you about a a project, you casually look at the clip and say ‘yeah, no problem’. And then you dig into it and quickly find out it’s a whole different animal. It’s very hard to to tell the simple and the hard apart unless you lived through all of them before.
That’s why I think it’s so valuable to have tutorials that show the hard examples, not the straight forward stuff.