Painting clean plates is another task commonly assigned to junior compositors. While roto is an easy and tedious job, paint can be very challenging. Every shot brings unique challenges, and many will require you to use a variety of techniques. A shot might require paint work in order to remove wires or other rigs that were necessary for the shot but shouldn't appear in the finished work. Sometimes lighting or sound equipment is visible accidentally and needs to be removed, or it was impossible to shoot a fantasy piece in the countryside without telephone wires visible in the background. Perhaps an effect calls for a character to dissolve into mist, and you need to create whatever set should have been behind them.
Although I use the term "paint," the Paint tool is usually not the first tool I reach for when doing this kind of work. If you attempt to touch up an image frame-by-frame by painting on it, you will almost certainly introduce chatter—pixels that dance and flicker—because it is virtually impossible to repeat a paint stroke from frame to frame, particularly if the image being painted is also moving. Transforms, warps, image filtering, and other methods are all used to supplement the Paint tool when the time comes to remove something from the frame. Let's get to work.Continue reading →
