Reflextion in actors sun glasses

[Joe Barker]

On a recent outdoors shoot the day turned into a 100 deg scorcher and the actors had to wear sunglasses because of the bright sunlight.I usualy try to avoid this at all costs,but in a couple of scene's it was unavoidable because of the actors squinting their eyes.Unfortunatly in a couple of the shots I can just pick out the relextion of the camera man in the actors sun glasses.This is hardly noticable on a small screen but on a big screen it will be more of an issue. How hard would it be to remove the reflextion's in the editing suite? I have just started using Premier pro 1.5 and am unsure if it can be done in this program.Has anyone had positive results correcting similar reflextion issue?

[Carlos E. Martinez]

Originally Posted by Joe Barker

On a recent outdoors shoot the day turned into a 100 deg scorcher and the actors had to wear sunglasses because of the bright sunlight.I usualy try to avoid this at all costs,but in a couple of scene's it was unavoidable because of the actors squinting their eyes.Unfortunatly in a couple of the shots I can just pick out the relextion of the camera man in the actors sun glasses.This is hardly noticable on a small screen but on a big screen it will be more of an issue. How hard would it be to remove the reflextion's in the editing suite? I have just started using Premier pro 1.5 and am unsure if it can be done in this program.Has anyone had positive results correcting similar reflextion issue?

Next time use a pola-screen and it will remove the reflections. Polarizers are hard to use when you have little light, because they will suck 2 stops from you, but when you are outdoors they come quite handy.

I surely would like to know how you can correct that in editing, but it should require "painting" of some sort.

Are you sure it's worth the trouble? Look at those shots on a big screen and see how distracting they can be. If the camera or people around it are not moving, you might be better off by leaving the reflection alone.

[Nick Jushchyshyn]

It's not a task you would generally take on with a video editor.
Depending on the amount and nature of the of motion of the glasses relative to the camera, you might use either a 2D Compositing tool or 3D pipeline.

If the performer is facing the camera and you just have subtle head motion to contend with, a compositing tool with 2d tracking features like After Effects Pro, Combustion, Nuke, etc.

If the person's is turning or their head is moving significantly, it would probably better/easier to go with a 3D solution ... though this gets much more involved. RealViz Matchmover Pro or 2d3 Boujou/Boujou Bullet could be used to track the motion in 3D, and most any 3d app (Cinema4D, 3dMax, Maya, Lightwave, etc.) could be used to render replacement reflections for the glasses.

If you're up for learning 3D, it really works out better and even easier than the 2D option. I've used this approach in the past to replace a ball in someone's hand with a CG object (as the camera rotates around the person in an arc) and also to track Tori Amos's head for the Sleeps With Butterflies video so a Maya artist could add flowers to her hair that were not present on set.

For a current project, we're shooting people in space suits on a greenscreen set. To avoid reflections in the helmet visors, we're shooting with no glass installed, tracking the helmets in 3D (Matchmover Pro), and then adding the visor glass (and more) to the helmets in post.