Hasta La Motion!

I’ve got this crazy wire removal task at my hands… wondering if anyone has any advice. (Due to the nature of the job, I’m not allowed to post the actual screen shots, so I’m attaching hand-drawn representations.) 🙂

The shot is about 260 frames long. There’s a thin wire that runs from top to bottom of the screen. On the screen, we have a CU of a woman’s face. She’s got an elaborate hairdo.

Because it’s a busy background, no automatic wire-removal tool really works. Whatever I try, – there’s a ripple that runs across. I presume that the same would happen if I tried to paint this wire out.

I’ve got a pretty good 3D track, and tried to map a clean plate I’ve painted, onto a Poisson Mesh via a Projection camera and Point Cloud Generator (taken from the trackers. 1200 of them.) This would have worked, had the actress kept her head in one plane. But unfortunately, she turns. As you can see from the reference, the beginning and the end frames are quite different, no single clean plate can cover the entire duration.

So I’ve created a clean plate for every tenth frame. Problem is, I can’t get them to blend together. Tried Grid Warps and Corner Pins, so far… but during crossfades, as I try to blend from one clean plate to the next, while projecting them onto a point cloud all the while, – the whole setup blurs. And, of course, hair shifts, and changes reflectivity in the light.

I am at my wit’s end, – and would really appreciate any ideas you might have.