Track paint and cloning in DR Fusion

[Cristian Baitg]

Would love a in deep tutorial on how to track correctly paint nodes in Fusion I need to clone out parts of a clip in motion and dont know how to solve it in Fusion In Mocha Pro I can do a plate track it and done but in Fusion everything is so complicated an unintuitive that I get stuck Its really frustrating how Fusion is so unfriendly to sporadic users I love all the other sections of Resolve but Fusion is a headache.

It would be helpful if Lowepost can create some tutorials with different scenarios on how to track and clone out objects in Fusion Youtube videos have lead me to a dead end so far.

[Abby Bader]

 

[Cristian Baitg]

 

Thank you 🙂

 

Tomorrow I will watch the full course. I hope I can find there what I am looking for.

 

 

 

Tomorrow I will watch the full course. I hope I can find there what I am looking for.

[Cristian Baitg]

I just remembered the course as I was watching it last year when I was starting with Fusion. Its great. Lots of useful tips. Unfortunately not solving my issue as I need to paint out many ( camera sensor dusts) at once and not track every one of them. Still searching for a solution when you have multiple objects, spots, etc you want to remove and you don't have the time to track one by one. With a few it might be possible when you have a dozen in multiple clip it becomes a nightmare. 

The shots were take with a slider so the motion is not erratic. I thought that a track would cover the motion pattern of all the spots . I was wrong. 

So as it stands now Davinci Resolve can work if you have one object to remove but as soon as you have many it is not a viable solution. Still searching.......

[Tom Evans]

Looks like you need to do some frame by frame work, this isn't complicated in Fusion but it's time consuming work. Or your could consider covering a larger area with a plate or see if you could get away with keying the dust parts and changing its color and luma levels. 

[Cristian Baitg]

Yes. I hope I can find another way. Painting out dozens of spots in hundreds of frames could take me a few days. There must be another solution. I thought something like this would be easy. Just clone all the spots out in one frame with the paint tool in Fusion and the track it. As all the spots move in the same direction in theory a track would maintain always the same cloning area and it would clone out as the camera moves.

The thing is I get lost in the tracking step. There are so many options (tracker, planer tracker, etc) and the modify with in the "stroke controls" (tracker position,  tracker steady position, tracker unsteady position,....) that I get confused. Once I have painted out all the spots I group them (as there are many strokes) with a paint group and go to controls and right click on the "Center x" and I choose "modify with" and I get 3 tracking options (tracker, tracker steady and tracker unsteady) -don't know which one to choose-In the tracker source I put the Media In but it does not track correctly (I am doing something wrong here for sure).

I have this clip where the magic needs to happen. The out of focus lights have the spots (I guess dust spots from the lens rear element) This are the ones that need to go. I would love if someone here at Lowepost, as there are many people with a deep understanding of Fusion if something like that is possible to remove with paint and track (and how) -a tutorial posted here would be really helpful for people like me that are having problems in Fusion with tracking and paint-, or I am dreaming and such a situation the only option as you suggest is to paint out frame by frame.

Clip to remove dust spots on the out of focus lights

 

[Craig Harris]

Hey, Cristian.

This was a really quick result of your shot using Fusion with a TimeSpeed node combined with the Paint Clone tool. For this example I created an animate polygon mask around the left side of the screen where I applied the TimeSpeed to "0" and then painted out some of the bokeh with the PaintClone tool. Once you get familiar with some of the approaches like this it's actually very fast. 

The same technique would apply to the spots on the glass or any other part of the image you want to remove. Members on this forum probably have other ways they would approach this kind of work, too. This is just one way that I find works for some of my projects.

 

 

[Cristian Baitg]

Thank you very much!!! . I would like to remove the little spots inside the bokeh lights (not the bokeh lights) but the principle you applied in your example is very interesting. What is the "timespeed to 0" achieving? I can paint one group of spots inside one bokeh light track it and it is ok. 

But I have two big doubts:

1- If I do a general track (as the movement direction is all the same for the bokeh lights) would it apply to all the bokeh lights?

2- The lights move behind the lamp (or the ones inside the lamp) At the point they encounter the light the clone does not work anymore as they clone part of the light and everything is a mess. How would you do it. The only way I could imagine would be keyframe when it is about to touch the lamp to for example size to 0 or opacity to 0 and once it passes the lamp again put the initial value (opacity to 100 again). This still leaves me with the problem that I cannot make it work for all the lights as if I put opacity to 0 at that particular point all the other cloning will disappear (also for the lights that don't touch the lamp).

So I could make a general track for all the lights that dont get occluded and then a single one for every light that gets occluded? That seems the only way that comes to my mind. But I think there must a more simple way to achieve it or....... may be not .... Ohhh man VFX is so complicated 😄

In any case thank you very much for your help. I will try to see if I can learn on a tutorial what that timespeed function is used for.

Cheers.

[Craig Harris]

1 hour ago, Cristian Baitg said:

Thank you very much!!! . I would like to remove the little spots inside the bokeh lights (not the bokeh lights) but the principle you applied in your example is very interesting. What is the "timespeed to 0" achieving? I can paint one group of spots inside one bokeh light track it and it is ok. 

But I have two big doubts:

1- If I do a general track (as the movement direction is all the same for the bokeh lights) would it apply to all the bokeh lights?

2- The lights move behind the lamp (or the ones inside the lamp) At the point they encounter the light the clone does not work anymore as they clone part of the light and everything is a mess. How would you do it. The only way I could imagine would be keyframe when it is about to touch the lamp to for example size to 0 or opacity to 0 and once it passes the lamp again put the initial value (opacity to 100 again). This still leaves me with the problem that I cannot make it work for all the lights as if I put opacity to 0 at that particular point all the other cloning will disappear (also for the lights that don't touch the lamp).

So I could make a general track for all the lights that dont get occluded and then a single one for every light that gets occluded? That seems the only way that comes to my mind. But I think there must a more simple way to achieve it or....... may be not .... Ohhh man VFX is so complicated 😄

In any case thank you very much for your help. I will try to see if I can learn on a tutorial what that timespeed function is used for.

Cheers.

1. It might. You'd want to use a planar tracker to track the plane that the bokeh is on. If that doesn't work you may have to do it manually. With that being said, it might be best to reach out to a VFX artist that you could hire to do the shot or teach you.

2. Trial and error. You'll have to see what works and if this method doesn't, then look for another approach. 

A note on the TimeSpeed. It allows you to create a freeze frame (set to 0) which is similar to how Mocha creates and uses plates.

Hope that helps.

[Cristian Baitg]

Thanks again.  Yes I am in the process of learning Fusion. There are quite a few of tutorials on how to clone out one object,spot,etc but I till haven't found anything about cloning different areas with a single tracking. I keep searching. I hope that maybe in the future Lowepost can make such a tutorial as it will be very helpful for those of us that need to retouch many blemishes and the like with a single tracking.

Thanks again for your help and input.

Cheers

[Jussi Rovanperä]

Most of the time i'll steady the shot, then paint and then add the movement back (the exact inverse of the steady).  So I'm not tracking the paint at all.

 

[Cristian Baitg]

1 hour ago, Jussi Rovanperä said:

Most of the time i'll steady the shot, then paint and then add the movement back (the exact inverse of the steady).  So I'm not tracking the paint at all.

 

Thats a great option. But would it work if you do a panning or a side to side with a slider (as my example). In this case the spots are in all the out of focus lights so as they enter the frame the new lights also have the spots. So if you freeze a frame you have to have the object you want to remove in it but in this case there are sill objects that need to be removed out of the frozen frame.  

In any case I think I saw a tutorial in Youtube on your technique by VFXstudy that I think is what you mean. 

Thanks for your input

Cheers.