Hello fellow CG artists! This is my first time posting so please bear with me...
As stated in the title, I am looking for some advice for a series of wire removal shots I need to get done. I have experience doing similar work to this before, but in this instance I am finding the shots to be a lot trickier and less forgiving than what I've encountered previously, and I am hoping to find some additional insights to make my workflow faster and/or easier. Here's the details:
In these shots, there are a number of objects hanging on fishing line... obviously the line needs to disappear but here's the catch: all the footage was recorded hand-held, which means there is movement in both the background as well as the hanging objects. In most (but not all) of the shots, the background is also very out of focus, making tracking difficult in some cases. If that wasn't enough, the wires move in front of various different patterns and gradients, which means creating a patch from a still frame is not going to work in many of these shots. Lastly, most of the shots have a lot of grain... so any solutions that involve feathering or different levels of opacity are going to mean I need to re-grain the affected areas somehow or else they will also stand out against the background.
I'm really struggling to come up with a way to handle some of these shots that doesn't involve manually painting out the lines in every frame. Thankfully, I think all of the shots are < 80 frames in length, so doing this method is still possible as a last resort, but in my experience rotopaint nodes are notorious for creating weird issues once they have 50+ paint layers in them, plus I need to get it done as quickly as possible.
I have searched for Nuke tutorials on wire removal via Google, but alas none of the examples I was able to find involve moving backgrounds... so they are of little help in this instance. FYI, I am using NukeX v9.