Removing object from background of Interview Footage
 

Hello,

I'm need to remove an object that is in the background of some interview footage I shot. The footage is stable so the object in the background remains stationary throughout the interview. Is there a way to accomplish this in Vegas? If this was photoshop, this would be an easy task.... It's just more complicated when you have 30 frames (stills) per second to deal with. Any suggestions (step by step instructions-better yet) to accomplish this task would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your feedback. This forum is always extrememly helpful.

Jerry

If you're using Pro 9 or Pro 10, render the section as an image sequence (it's the first option when you go to Render As) in the desired image format, open up Photoshop, set up a batch action if you can, run it and re-import the corrected images back into Vegas as an image sequence.

What Mike described would certainly work great, and give you all the controls available in Photoshop.

Quicker and sometimes dirtier is to use Vegas' various masking features for this sort of task. Any of these methods allows you to put your patch on an upper track, and make everything around the patch transparent, or, put the patch on a lower track, and cut a hole in the interview footage.

Quickest/dirtiest is to apply the cookie cutter filter. Could be applied at the event or (more likely) track level.

Not quite as quick, but, very precise and animatable with keyframes, is to cut a mask using the very versatile masking feature in Event Pan/Crop. One limitation with this is that it's only available at event level. Maybe at the media level? Never tried. But, mask settings can be saved and applied to other events.

If you've never fooled around with masking, it's a little of a steep learning curve, but goes better when you're trying to make a project work! Here's a random tutorial on youtube, there are lots out there. Search on "vegas masking tutorial", and perhaps look at Volume 3 Number 3 of Edward Troxel's Excellent Newsletters.