Hi all, I received some footage from a crew that needs to be edited however the lighting on location wasnt very good, everything can be seen, however there is a huge shadow caused by one of the actors on a white wall which looks horrible, is there anyway that I could get rid of the shadow using avid media composer? i also have the studio toolkit, with Avid FX, 3D and DVD by Sonic.

tomtom01

Hi,

You might be able to use the Paint Effect to get rid of it.  Can you post a screen shot of it?

good luck,
Carl 

 How can I post a screen shot? everytime i try to insert image it asks me for the URL?

 Tom Tom:

Under the options tab here in the reply screen, click "add/update" and navigate to the specific file you want to attach.

 ok thanks, hope this works, if it does you should be able to see a big shadow made by the girl walking into the room to deliver the cups of coffee and then she walks back out of the room. Any ideas?

 Tom Tom- depending on the version of MC you have, you could use the paint effect, clone the background without the shadow and use animatte to create a shape defining the shadow. Then you can use the tracking parameter to add a tracker for the movement. See this tutorial for using motion tracking.

Nasty.

I think Larry's suggestion is good - although you might want to try the 'lighten' mode in Paint Effect with feathering set to 2 or 3 (or whatever works).  I just don't see that you've got enough wall to clone.

The other option is to explain to the client that the shadow is a completely intentional representation of the character's unconscious wants and desires.

"I just don't see that you've got enough wall to clone."

I don't think Larry meant clone the wall from that specific shot - but if it was a lock down, they could clone the wall prior to the person entering frame to clone and paint the shadow out.

I once had to paint out a tongue piercing - it took 5 hours to paint it out so that you had no clue it was even there... that was a moving target with a lot of flapping obstructions. A flat brick wall should be a little easier but be patient if you want it to look really good.

 Solopost is correct, sorry I should have been more specific. Hopefully you have an empty frame of that shot before either person is on set so the entire section of wall affected is available to sample for cloning.

Is the shot locked off? Or does it pan zoom or wobble?

What I want to know is how you have such a strong shadow with so little light on the girl?

I have a technique that I've used in AE in the past to fix similar issues.  It's a complicated approach, but the results you achieve are as near flawless as it's possible to get.  I developed it while working on a movie with a lot of effects on hand-held originals.  If you don't have that problem use the Avid paint approach - it will work.  Obviously, if you don't have access to AE you won't do it either.

OK, the first step using the AE approach is to create a background plate of the wall without shadow.  You can do this in Photoshop, or if you already have a clean frame, export it from AE.  Now you create a proxy of your footage and stabilise it.  Adjust the proxy size so that at all times your frame is inside the composition window.  To clarify, if your frame size is 1920x1080, your composition size may end up 2040x1256 for example.  This has the major plus of reducing the degrees of movement that you will have to track.

Create a new composition submaster of the same dimensions and drop your background plate into it.  Drop your proxy on top and register it as well as you can with the background plate.  Mask the shadow area with a subtract mask and feather the edges.  If you need to further correct geometry errors, promote your background plate to 3D and rotate it, or use mesh warp to correct minor issues.

Finally, create a master compostion this time of the size of your original media, and drop the submaster composition into it.  Copy the position keyframes from the stabilised proxy into the target on your master, and adjust position so that it fits back precisely into the window.  Render it out.

The theory behind this admittedly complex approach is that you take the data that you used to stabilise the image and reapply it at the end of the process to turn it back into the same motion as the original.  The key here is that offsets applied to target values have the negative effect to offsets applied to position.  Because AE can use virtually any frame size that available memory will support you will virtually never run out of adjustment range.

So to reiterate:  you end up with 1 oversize proxy that has been roughly stabilised, 1 oversize submaster with shadow removed using a background plate distorted to match the proxy distortion if any, and 1 master the same size as your original, with the same motion component, but NO SHADOW.

I would be inclined to reduce the opacity of the mask so that you could still see a slight shadow.  Totally removing it, while possible, wouldn't look totally natural.

 Hi all, thanks for all the ideas of how to fix this, im trying out a few to see what works best. The problem is its a shot the audiences pov, so

 Hi all, thanks for all the ideas of how to fix this, im trying out a few to see what works best. The problem is its a shot the audiences pov, so the camera is looking to the right to start with and talking directly with the blonde girl, then pans across looking at the door with the other girls entrance, follows her back to the 1st girl they talk then follows her out again then back to the blonde girl (all very complicated) or infact more complicated when typing it out then it looks on screen. so thats a bit of the problem with trying to cover up the problem, most of it is movement, from both camera and actors.