It's called photoshop. You import the video clip you need to do the wire removal on, then, frame by frame, you go in and remove the wires by using a cloning tool to replace the vertical black lines of the wires with pixels taken from the background immediately next to it, Thus, you make a seamless shot of no wires or cables. Then export the finished video clip back into your saved take folder.

Before you follow Joe Meils' advice...

Assuming your camera work is steady (tripod) you can do a bit of prework first...

You can take a frame or two of your footage, chosen so that the area blocked by the wires in one are shown in the other. Then use those two photos to make a single background frame. Layer that behind the footage and then use a travelling garbage mat over the wires to remove them and show the background layer.

This will most likely get rid of the bulk of the wires but probably not the stuff near to the character which is likely to have moving arms, cape, or hair or other issues to make it difficult. So once you've gotten that far you can import your clip into Photoshop. Then put that same background frame beneath the image and use the erase tool to erase the wires you couldn't get before. There "should" be less work this way.

Again, if your camera is shakey this won't work or will be far more effort than it is worth and you'd be far better off using Joe Meils technique.

RJSchwarz
San Diego, CA

Thanks huys, how do you import each frame of your video into a photoediting program. I'm using vegas if that matters

Rob - UK

Hopefully Vegas has a way to dump an entire scene out frame-by-frame to Photoshop. It's a lot of images by the way. At least 24 per second. And the way the pixels are handled between video and image editors is different. I believe FCP is designed to export to Photoshop so that the pixel issue is handled but I'm not entirely sure. I don't know about Vegas though, it's a professional grade program so it probably has the same stuff.

RJSchwarz

You learn some thing new every day =? well I do =P

Cleary

www.myspace.com/b31_film_productions

quote:

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Originally posted by robmanu7

In films how do they remove wires.

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In movies with budgets you'd use a compositing program that does most of the work for you; Fusion, for example, just requires you to mark the top and bottom of the wire on the shot, tweak a few options and let the computer do the rest. You can even use the tracking tools to follow the wires so you don't need to manually adjust the end points if the camera or object moves.

Fusion basically seems to squash together a few pixels on each side of the wires so that they disappear; I presume you could do that on each frame in Photoshop too, that's pretty much what the cloning idea would do.