How to remove a boom pole from a shot [Part 1/2 - Static shots]

So a boom pole drifts into your shot. Pretty bad eh? But fret not, it’s actually relatively easy to remove it from a static, locked down shot.

So in this topic we’ll be going over a technique to remove a boom pole from a static shot in Adobe After Effects. It’s hard to give a step-by-step description in text, so I still recommend you to watch the video where I go through the entire process step-by-step.

The overall concept is fairly simple actually, it involves only a few main steps.

• Acquire a clean plate (a still frame where there is no boom pole in the shot)The clean plate can be acquired by taking a still frame when the boom pole Is out of the frame. If there is no such frame, you can always generate one by clone-stamping the boom out a frame in PhotoShop.

• Lay the clean plate over the main layer.

• Mask the clean plate around the intruding boomThis way, only the area that is masked around will show up, which is the area around the boom. The clean plate will then obscure the boom-intruded areas in the underlying layer.

• Keyframe the maskKeyframe the mask so it moves along with the boom as it moves about the frame.

• Feather the maskGive the mask a slight feather to hide any hard edges that might show up.

That’s pretty much it for removing a boom pole. It’s a little bit more complicated if the shot moves around, but we’ll cover that in the next post/video. To see the process step-by-step, be sure to watch the video!