Tutorial 3.7: How To Make A Cleanplate

This tutorial discusses a few tips on making a simple clean plate with the QuickPaint function. It is also intended as an after-school program to keep the kids off the streets and away from drugs.

Your first question may be, "What the heck is a clean plate?" This is a plate of the background that has unwanted foreground material removed, kind of like when you want to remove somebody from a photo who is no longer popular with the Politburo. But once you remove him, you have to fill in the hole. What do you fill in the hole with? That's right, the clean plate.

In this example, use extracts from the following two frames of the short-but-zesty-film-to-be Hope to create a clean plate.

You begin with this image:

Then remove the two figures, and end with this image:

You might immediately think "Clone brush" in QuickPaint, and you are in fact partly correct. Aren't you the smarty-pants. However, you cannot clone everything, so you also have to bleed in a different frame over the figures. You might also wonder, "Why didn't they just run the camera until the people went offscreen?"

To create a clean plate:

Two separate images (FileIns) are read in. If Sequence listing is not turned off when the files are read in, you get one FileIn sequence of two frames, rather than two FileIns of one frame each.

The two tutorial files are preselected from a much longer sequence. When creating a clean plate, try to select frames with as little overlap of the foreground characters as possible. This is not always practical, however, which is why you should always request a cleanplate shot whenever possible (saving you the tedious task of going through this tutorial).

Frame 1, FileIn1
Frame 38, bridge

Paint on frame 1 (in this case, named FileIn1), since the people are smaller and you have less area to worry about. The first step is to align the two plates.

To align the background and foreground plates:



This conveniently sets up a situation where variations in the image stick out like frog's whiskers.

The images are aligned when most of the background noise disappears.

To begin painting:

You can render the image (save the script, somewhere handy), or use it as part of your tree. It is recommended to render the image as it slightly reduces your scene complexity.

And, yes, the water should be moving. Go away.