Clean Plate Object Removal for DaVinci Resolve
Freeze Frame Paint Cleanup
DaVinci Resolve Studio has several custom tools to remove objects, like the “object removal tool” or the “patch replacer” tool. Both are built for the color page and lack the precision to get a commercial-quality paint cleanup right in the application. Thankfully, the Fusion page has a high-quality vector-based paint tool that allows clone brushing and is simple. If you want to follow along step by step, the footage used in this tutorial is available to download here on the cutting club (scroll down). This is the best way you can help support my time and hosting fees.
To start, you will need to frame-hold a reference frame. Choose this frame wisely because your tracking must begin from this frame for the match-move to work in the point tracker tool. To freeze-frame any frame, park the orange frame indicator on the frame you want to freeze, and with the timespeed tool, click the “Freeze Frame” button.
Paint
Fusion paint is not initially set up to work on all frames, but most of the time, you’ll want to paint on all frames with modifiers that have the ability to tweak later ones. With the paint tool, choose “stroke” instead of the default multistroke. To clone, in the inspector choose the apply mode to clone instead of the paint bucket and go to town painting. Like Photoshop or Affinity Photo, you will option/alt click the area to copy from and brush any object away.
Mask Paint to Create a Patch
Because we only want to change the small area we are cleaning up in the image, we need to create a polygon or b-spline to mask only that area. I prefer to apply the b-spline to a matte control node using “combine alpha” and post multiply image and have the mask connect into the green foreground of the matte control.
Tracking
The basic point tracker can do a lot more than you realize with several different match move settings. Intellitrack is the new default, and I chose it for this simple tutorial. Place the search box on top of the object and track forward. The frame you start tracking from should ideally be your “reference frame”, the frame you painted on. Under the tracker match move settings this is known as “select time” and can’t be configured after the tracking has been completed. So choose wisely.
Pick either the start frame, end frame, or middle (started from tracking frame) to paint out your clean plate. By the way, it is also not a problem at all to right click the viewer and export an EXR to paint out in a photo application since it’s just a still frame.
The operation tab of the tracker tool in the inspector should be changed to operation - match move - merge FG over BG. This converted the tracker tool into a merge that just needs you to connect your painted out patch into the green foreground of the tracker. Now connect the tracker output to the MediaOut node, and you’re done!
Well, almost done. Next, we need to take care of any color and exposure changes for frames that aren’t that reference frame.
Pixel Analyzer and Color Matcher
Millolabs Tuts developed the ML pixel analyzer and the color matcher macros that can be installed from Blackmagic Fusion Reactor.
Reactor does require some of the scripting UI capabilities only found in DaVinci Resolve Studio, but I think this these macros are worth the price of admission. If you are new to Fusion Reactor, I have a tutorial here that explains how you can install it.
The pixel analyzer works using the prob modifier built into Fusion. You will need to feed the pixel analyer tool a stabilized version of the footage, which can be achieved by copying and pasting the tracker tool and changing the merge mode in the match move settings to BG only. So now you’ll have 2 trackers in your flow, one just for the pixel analyzer and one to do the match moving of the cleaned up patch.
Size the pixel analyzer up to the area that is getting replaced and we will connect the average value into the color matcher tool.
The color matcher tool needs to go in the node setup after the cleanup. Right-click in the destination color section on the words “red”, “green”, blue” to connect to the average value of red, green, and blue that come from the pixel analyzer. Then move the playhead to the reference frame and click the button - Set Destination to Source and you’re done!
The color matcher tool has automatically applied gain values to the patch based on a average pixel value it pulls frame by frame in the pixel analyzer tool!
