painting shadows in motion 3?

[Josh Bass]

If one made a booboo in one's lighting, and wanted to paint a shadow on a wall where one should have put one in the first place, could one do that with motion 3? One realizes one would have to do manual motion tracking/rotoscoping when the camera starts to move or an actor obscures the part of the wall in question, and one will deal with that as necessary.

Just wondering if motion can do this kind of stuff.

Another option is exporting relevant video as image sequence and using photoshop to accomplish same, then making images back into video clip.

Do not have After Effects.

[Craig Parkes]

What kind of shadow, what kind of camera movement - you could do this in Motion, you could also do this in Color if it was just to throw a shadow against a wall to make the scene not so flat (using secondaries to create a darkening vignette in a custom shape, then tracking that to the scene using the tracker in Color.)

But it becomes problematic there is any depth to the wall, or if the camera is moving around, rather than just tracking/craning in a parallel direction. At that point you start looking at 3D tracking, which isn't a feature of Motion from memory.

[Josh Bass]

Well, that's the upside.

Basically, here's the deal: I have a darkened room. On one wall, I did a "lighting gag" that is supposed to be ambient night spill coming in through a window. Only looking at this footage later did I realize I shaped my pattern incorrectly. I need to add some darkness that matches the dark wall, to cover/replace where some of the light hits. This is what I mean by shadow. Wall in question is flat.

It's a totally static shot for a while, then a character walks up to the lens, obscuring the problematic wall area. Then the camera pans (we're already not seeing the wall at this point), then we come back to the original composition, more or less.

Some of this depends on how the movie is cut. I highly doubt all of that will be used.

I do have Color, just don't think of it 'cause I have no way to view my results on an external monitor, but for something like this it might be perfect.

If I have to reshape the mask frame by frame, yes it's tedious, but I can deal with it.

[Craig Parkes]

In this case, with something obscuring the frame, Motion would be a better bet because I am pretty sure it is going to be much easier to key frame roto mask for the shape in motion. In fact I am pretty sure you can't do that in Color, you can only attach the shape to a tracker.

[Josh Bass]

can't you create a mask with an infinite number of points in color, and then simply reposition those points frame by frame as needed?

I'm sorry, I should've mentioned this earlier. . .what I'd REALLY like to do is take a copy of the layer of video, crop it to just a dark section of wall, and move that cover where I want to. Kind of like using the rubber stamp tool in photoshop. So I wouldn't be painting a shadow per se, but repurposing a piece of video that already exists.

oh hell. Let me just attach a still.

[Josh Bass]

Now everyone can see what I'm talking about.