Working from a Clean Plate

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‌Working from a Clean Plate

If you want to manually clean up a single plate, and have that plate used as a source of all replacement pixels, you can use ViewShift to do that—all you have to do is use the clean plate as the source shot! In addition to the clean plate, you'll need to know the camera position that corresponds to it.

Note : A clean plate can result in noiseless replaced areas, you may have to add noise back in!

Note : Cleaning a single plate makes sense only for relatively compact shots, since on longer traveling shots the cleaned plate will wind up off the edge of other parts of the shot. In such cases, you should probably use the original shot as the ViewShift source with a Disjoint timing mode, or perhaps do a static Texture Extraction on an extended reflector mesh.

In the simplest case, you clean up one of the frames of the live, already-tracked, shot that you've prepped for ViewShift with reflector mesh(es), splines, etc. If you cleaned up frame 37, then the camera information needed to use that clean plate is... exactly frame 37's information.

To quickly handle setup once you've got your clean plate and initial ViewShift scene setup, set the current SynthEyes frame to the frame corresponding to the clean plate (eg frame 37 here), then run the Script/ViewShift/Prepare for Clean Plate script. It will do the following (all of which you could do yourself):

- Prompt you for the location of the clean plate.

- Add it to your scene as a very short (single frame) shot, ie Camera02.

- Copy the camera position and field of view information from the current frame to frame zero of the new shot.

- Adjust the ViewShift to set the source to the single-frame Camera02.

- Make a copy of any light that supplies illumination compensation, bringing the illumination level information from the current frame to the new shot's frame zero.

You're ready to ViewShift!

If you later update the main camera track by re-running the solver or manually repositioning the scene, the clean plate camera will need to be updated with the modified camera position. Use the Update Clean Plate Camera script to do that. The clean plate's frame was recorded when you ran the preparation script; the camera's position and field of view will be copied to the clean plate camera, any copied illumination light will be updated, and the current frame will be set to the original clean plate frame to remind you which it was.

Tip : Before running, ViewShift automatically flushes the source shot's cache if it is only a single frame, so that you can modify your clean plate and see the modifications the next time you ViewShift, without having to Script/Flush Cache on the source camera, as would otherwise be necessary.

If your clean plate is not from the shot you're cleaning , you'll need to either add the single-frame shot yourself, or use the script to get started.

Then, you'll need to set up the exact camera location. There are a variety of methods depending on what you have and know. The coordinate system for the second shot must exactly match the first. The main possibilities are

- Use Seed Points solving mode with some known XYZ positions, even on the single frame.

- Use Pin Mesh in camera-pinning mode.

You'll also need the camera field of view; depending on your clean plate, you might be able to use the field of view determined from the main shot.

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