Introduction
In this lesson, we practised shot clean-up.
Shot clean up is the process of digitally removing errors and unwanted details in the shot of a film or video. A lot of software can be used for shot clean-up – in this lesson, we used Adobe Photoshop.
Why is shot clean-up needed in film?
Shot clean-up is needed to remove many unwanted elements in a shot such as:
- wires being used to suspend actors and props
- unwanted artefacts that appear on film
- accidental people – a member of the production crew or an extra could be in a shot when they aren’t supposed to be
- unwanted objects – this could be a boom mic in the corner of a shot or a misplaced prop that doesn’t fit with the continuity of the scene
- greenscreen shadows
- reflections on surfaces – that may show the camera operator
- removing branding or text from signs
- random objects that are uncontrollable – planes or birds flying in the sky
- stunt equipment
Clean Plate
The clean plate is a frame of footage that is used in shot clean-up to replace parts of video that have unwanted details. It is a single frame where none of the unwanted details show up, which is used to remove those elements from later frames in the footage.
In this lesson, we used photoshop to clean and restore a frame, before using that to apply those corrections to the footage directly.
The tools I used were:
Spot Healing Brush Tool
Patch Tool
Here is a view of what the footage I edited looked like before and after I cleaned up the shot.
I then put the footage into after effects to see how well I was able to clean up the greenscreen.
Pretty clean.
Conclusion
This is a useful VFX skill to have – especially when working with greenscreens. I could see myself using shot clean-up in my own work, or while working on VFX for another production.