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| Here's a little fix I did yesterday on an episode of a series we post. We were doing the final approval when the producer noted that no ink went onto the paper when the woman signing the document. The DP was in the room and said he remembered the problem but assured the producer they had done a take with ink. We were to begin mastering in a couple of hours but their editor was off and they didn't know who would source the footage. I had remembered seeing another shot in the show where the same woman signed a document, but it was not from the side like this one but from above or in front, so upside down. I told them I could fix this in an hour rather than them going back and searching their archives and they agreed to have me repair it. I grabbed a still of the signature at the moment her hand moved to reveal it, but there was still a shadow. I took the still into Photoshop and deleted the background so only the writing remained. I then used transform distort to turn the signature and angle it down to precisely match the footage of the woman writing with no ink. I motion tracked the surface of the paper using some nearby text, because the paper moves up and down as she presses with the pen. I color corrected the writing so it matched the new environment. I duplicated the source footage with the pen moving and put it on a layer above the signature and made a mask the shape of the bottom of the pen so the pen would move in front of the new signature layer. I motion tracked the pen with the AE tracker then used Mathias tracker to mask script to move the mask with the pen. Only took a couple of tweaks to perfect. Then I unveiled the signature with an animated AE mask as she wrote, so it was even her own signature. This may not be so stunning to old AE users but maybe some of the new users will find this of interest. I find AE such a great tool for fixing almost anything on a daily basis. |
