Using fusion to clean up aerial footage - a free tutorial

Hey everyone - I put together a tutorial covering a technique I love using, and maybe you'll find it useful, and i'd like to share it.

It covers painting out bits of footage and crane removal - but it's also useful on finished full CG shots and has a ton of other applications too.
You can see it in motion during the first 60s of the video.

You have to copy and paste the link, unfortunately - I'm apparently not allowed to post URL's but there's no information anywhere saying how many posts I have to make to be able to do that.

youtube.com/watch?v=I4QzB7tT6zQ


Part of the motivation to create this came from speaking to people about AE vs Fusion, and people who use AE on a regular basis simply not knowing why they’d ever use fusion (or nuke), or what node based compositing offers over AE.
The ideal viewer is someone who has poked around at it for a while but is currently using fusion as if it's a slightly more flexible AE.

I bumbled my way through this technique using max to render out full sequences and map them onto planes about 12 years ago (absolute misery), and then when I started using fusion 6 I realized I could probably move the entire process over to a single fusion document. Over time and only actually working on shots like this once a year it's been refined and tidied up to something quite organized.

It seems like this approach is definitely underrepresented in tutorials, and so I felt it was a good subject to cover. I would not be where I am without endless free tutorials, other people sharing knowledge, and having been on communities/forums my entire career. hopefully, this will help some others to do better, cleaner work.

While it is long, it is intended to be extremely comprehensive. The technique is covered in the first 20 minutes, then the remainder of the video goes into a practical large-scale application of this - and after I’m done, a bit of an overview of the pros and cons of various areas.
It’s broken up into chapters for easy reference - ideally, after watching, someone will understand the application and where it will be good to use, then when you come to pull it back up as a production reference ‘on the job’, however long later that is, you’ll be able to jump to a specific chapter.
It’s not a day-to-day technique, but it turns what is an absolute pain in the ass job using AE into something that is easy, flexible, and quite enjoyable to work on.
If you get 20 minutes in and think this is something you could use, I would recommend watching it in full before trying to ‘follow along’ on a live project - there is some insight towards the end when I’m covering the finished document about what worked well and what I had to fight with a little. I tried to cover every single application and thing you might encounter in the same project, but it did cause a few challenges that could have been avoided (but then, I wouldn't have been able to show working around them...)

I imagine there are more ways this can be refined further - if it does spark an idea or you have a way to take this even further, I’d love to hear about it!

Thankyou Neil, wow, 1h 29m 24s, a full feature. I will certainly watch that later and perhaps some in house catering will be involved.

Watched the whole thing. It was fantastic! Thank you for taking the time to put this together.

For those reading, it takes a solid camera track so you might be able to get away with the camera tracker in Fusion but he uses SynthEyes to lock in the solve and get the footage to work.

The technique is called UV Map Projection.
Here's the process in Nuke if anyone would like to compare the flows.

Watched the whole thing. It was fantastic! Thank you for taking the time to put this together.

For those reading, it takes a solid camera track so you might be able to get away with the camera tracker in Fusion but he uses SynthEyes to lock in the solve and get the footage to work.

Thank you! Really appreciate you watching it all.
and yeah - I wanted to cover other uses in the video, simple cleanup with no CG being added, and exporting a full CG camera/final rendered shot to add layering (I used this to great effect to add steam with depth recently), but it was already getting a bit long...
Ultimately the audience I felt needed to see this most was people in arch viz, who do aerial shots and already have tracks but fumble their way through cleanup (or do none at all)