Had to move a clip partially out of frame, how to deal with the new empty space?

Question

I hope this makes sense...

• What you see in the clip is a womans arm, and then her grey patterned shirt.
• The video clip is constantly panning up towards the woman's head

I had to move the clip to the left side a little to create room for text that will go on top of her grey shirt, which left a blank area to the right side. I just filled in the blank area with solid blue so you could see the area I'm talking about

But this looks hideous, can anyone think of a good solution to this?

At first I thought I would stretch the shirt to fill the area by cropping it down to just the shirt and then stretching the cropped portion to cover the blue area. But this looks equally as bad because the pattern of that shirt looks very stretched and unnatural. It looks much worse in motion, which I'll show you below

Coming from my photoshop background, what I would do on a still image is I would simply clone stamp some of the shirt to cover the blue area with portions of this shirt, but I dont know if thats possible with all the video motion, or is it possible?

I'm desperate and open to any ideas any genius out there has!

Thanks!

Answer 1

It is possible to take a similar approach like you would in photoshop. I recommend using After-Effects, as premiere doesn't really have the abilities to do so effectively. In After-Effects, you can try out the "content aware fill" that was introduced in 2020, I believe.

However, content awareness only works in some cases, and when trying to seamlessly continue the motion and behaviour of cloth, this could get tricky. So let me propose two more options, one simple and one that requires some more work.

First off, you could just use a gradient from blue to alpha, and let the solid blue fade out over the shirt, with the solid's area of 100% opacity just touching the right side of your clip, in order to conceal the edge.

The other method is tricky, and I frankly never tried this myself. You could actually go out of your way and try to simulate cloth using a projected texture from your footage in a 3D-software such as Houdini, Cinema4D, Modo, Blender or something similar with the ability to simulate cloth. In order to match the motion, you could try a cloud-tracker, such as Mocha or the integrated tracker from Resolve and try to apply the vertices of the left side of your simulation to the most right vertices of your cloud-tracking-points. This could work, but I am not 100% confident that it will.

Anyways, I hope this helped you out a bit, have a good one :)

Answer 2

You could try using the Repetile effect in After Effects. This extends and repeats a layer based on certain rules - in this case I'd try unfolding or flipping it, so you see a mirror of what was on the other side. Maybe do a gradual blur around the whole frame too, so it is less noticeable.

Florian's answers are likely to give better results but take more time I think.

Answer 3

Zoom in.

Hm, thirty more characters to go.