Troubleshooting 101 – Cleanup With The Color Compressor And Node Resizing

Using Node Resizing To Clean Up The Product

Finding And Combining Textures To Distract The Viewer

In this video Insight, we look at cleanup on a visual issue with a product.

The product in question is the crank for a mountain bike which is essentially the drive train that turns the chain as you pedal.

Due to issues with the riders chain the chain was flying off and damaging the frame.

The client would probably have let the film go out if we couldn’t clean up the issue but my motto is I’ll always try my best to make them happy.

The Shot Before Cleanup

The Shot After Cleanup

I’ll be the first to say that the cleanup job isn’t flawless but Jacob the director (who has an amazingly dry sense of humor) said that “honestly nobody will notice” so we moved on.

It’s easier to breakdown my methods in the video insight below but it was all achieved on the colour page in Resolve

Summary: The Cleanup

This shot essentially doesn’t move too much. Due to the motion blur at the top we can simply turn off any of our paint out techniques and keyframe them back on when the motion blur subsides and the damaged areas become visible.

This is a behind the curtain look at this fix where my method may not be the easiest or fastest but worked really well for me in this situation.

In the Insight below we look at:

• Using the color compressor to push the white marks on the frame into the same orange as the frame
• Using the color compressor to push the black gouges towards the same orange as the frame
• Using node sizing to cover up the damaged texture with undamaged frame

Let’s jump over to my video below to see how I achieved the result, and additional thoughts I had while finding the solution that worked for me.

(Note: Above I’ve linked to other Insights on Mixing Light that covers each of these topics in more depth. If you’re not familiar and want to know more after watching this video, come back and click through. This Insight assumes you have a basic understanding of these topics.)

-Dan