Rotoscoping with Aperture

Not long ago, I posted an article about sensor cleaning. It had a huge response and it’s still visited regularly today. It’s a problem that affects us all, sooner or later… and it isn’t going away anytime soon.!!

As you may know, dust bunnies are not so hard to remove on stills, at least on the majority of occasions, but when we’re talking about motion picture, the story doesn’t always have a happy ending.

I also mentioned (on that same post) that I was going to look at a “feasible” solution to “clean” the dust off your clips… and here it is!

If you are a proficient After Effects user, this method might not be the ideal solution for you… It is intended for those who don’t usually venture into this level of post production, but need a quick and easy fix, to what otherwise could be a good shot turned useless… it isn’t perfect, but it might “save your life” sometime…

I was shooting in the desert, in the middle of a “mild” wind storm… and as you know, there’s a lot of dust in the desert… I was also trying to push the envelope and shoot some video in the middle of my photo shoot, to evaluate the workflow impact and see what I could come up with, for potential future applications. (I will probably write more on this soon…)

The results were pretty exciting until I got home and started seeing dust spots all over the place… and if you like changing lenses as often as I do, you’ll be running the very same risk, whenever you shoot outside.

I really didn’t have a whole lot of time for this project, but I didn’t want it to go to waste either. So after finishing the pics and delivering them to the client, I decided to load these clips into my laptop and play with them whenever I had a chance. Finally one day it hit me! Why not use exactly the same method that so efficiently and effortlessly, got rid of the dust on my stills?!

Aperture has some very powerful editing features. Especially now on version 3! But it’s the powerful set of batch processing capabilities, that make this workflow feasible.

I had the project inside of Color when I was about to give up on it, because of all those damn dust spots. I was happy with pretty much everything else, specially considering I had shot this with basic photography equipment and mostly available light. Well I did use lights in a few of the shots… but I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait a while to hear about those…

So, after sending the project back to FCP, rendered and color corrected in Color, I exported the whole clip as sequential Tiffs into a folder I would then import to Aperture.

My Aperture loved dealing with these uncompressed 2mp pics, comparing with the 21mp RAW files I usually load it up with. It was so much fun whizzing through the pics with the arrow keys. I felt like a pro animator playing with my living cartoon… haha!

Back in my sequential Tiffs project I chose a frame to start working on and using the Spot & Patch tool, exactly in the same way you would do in a regular still, I started getting rid of the damn dust spots.

Very soon my frame became an immaculate image, like it had no longer been haunted by unwanted debris on the sensor. But the real fun part was only about to begin!

Using the lift metadata tool, I “copied” the miraculous Spot & Dust settings, so I could stamp them onto the rest of the frames.

I soon learned that the dust had shifted throughout the shoot and that these adjustments should be double checked on a shot by shot basis. Not frame by frame, though, which is why this is both cool and feasible!
Aperture makes it very easy to visually select a range of frames to isolate a particular shot that you wanna stamp the settings to. All you need to do is cycle to viewer, by pressing V.

The Spot and Patch tool, although great, does have it’s limitations. It works flawlessly in uniform backgrounds, but anything that has a lot of detail, will show what it’s really doing and you’re bound to see a blurred spot, where it is applied.
Narrowing down the size of the Spot & Patch circles and playing with the Radius, Softness and Opacity can help minimize the problems, but in some parts you’re just better off not using it at all. Usually, when a spot goes over a lot of detail, it has a tendency of not being visible. There’s no magic formula to determine when to use it or not to use it… with time and experimentation you’ll be able to decide that for yourself. After all, although not in the most traditional way, you’re in dust busting land, now… The good news is that using the lift and stamp tool, you can easily delete a Spot & Patch circle, lift the metadata and stamp it to the range of frames where you don’t need that particular one. The other cool thing is that because Aperture is not processing a RAW file, so it flies through the frames, when you hold either the left or right arrow keys (going back or forward, respectively), which allows you to see your footage in slow motion, flip book style!

After playing with the arrow keys for a while, I was confident enough to exported the Tiffs of that particular shots, back out to a new tests folder. Then I reimported it back into FCP, too see it in proper full frame rate motion. Since Aperture doesn’t have a 10 bit option for Tiff export, you should use 16 bit, to make sure there’s no color information loss.

Before you import any frames back into FCP make sure you go to user settings and under the editing Tab set the Still/Freeze Frame duration to 1 frame, otherwise your frames will have whatever duration is previously set and you won’t be able to visualize your shots correctly.

Create a new sequence and make sure your sequence settings correspond to the original frame rate. I also recommend using either ProRes HQ or even uncompressed, if your system can handle it. Select all the frames in the browser and drop them in the timeline in one go, so they’ll be layed out sequentially. Depending on your system’s capabilities you might see a red line on the top of your timeline, meaning you have to render it. But even if you get a green line, I would recommend rendering anyway, so you can see the shot exactly how it will be once you’re all done.

Once you’re confident all your shots have been fixed, it’s time to export the whole “enchilada” into a folder and import it back into FCP.

For peace of mind, I duplicated the sequence I had originally exported the frames from and overlaid the Tiffs over the clips, so I could make sure nothing had changed throughout the process. After making sure the frames and cuts were matching, I felt comfortable to move forward. It is most rewarding to turn the top layer on and off and see the difference you made, after going through all this trouble…

All that was left to do was to rendered it and watch a color corrected, dust busted version of my clip with a smile on my face!

Dry Lake Muses from RadRaven on Vimeo.

Music by Oakenfold 

There is definitely a learning curve to this process. It will all depend on where you’re coming from and the experience you have with motion picture post.
Although I’m comfortable using After Effects, I definitely see myself using this method again. All in all, I found it a very interesting and relatively easy way to solve a nightmare… without spending a lot of time or money.

The best thing about this whole workflow is that it is not limited to dust busting! It might inspire you to know that using exactly the same process I tweaked the color a little, finetuning a few nuances I wasn’t able to fix in Color…

Yeah, you got it! Those amazing features that Aperture offers for color correction, like Vibrancy can now be used to “color” your videos using this workflow!!!

Now that Aperture supports video, I have no idea what the technical implications of making all these tools available to use on clips is…?! But with the advent of HDSLRs and the merging of photography and motion picture worlds, I don’t know what Apple is waiting for to make this all more streamlined?!
The new editing tools don’t really show there’s been any serious thought thrown in this direction… but then again, although I love Apple and would never be able to do what I do without them, I can never figure out what their line of thought is…

Hope you enjoyed this article, make good use of this workflow and I would love to see how you’re putting it to use! So don’t be shy! You never know… if it’s exciting enough, I might even feature you and your work right in here!!!

As usual, comments and questions are more then welcome! And if you have any other subjects you’d like me to address, make them known to me and I’ll do my best to make it happen!

T ; )~