Fast Marker Removal gizmo for nuke (update version)

One of the usual things to do in Nuke is remove marker, some plates has a lot of them and removing can take a while. I made this small gizmo to remove them fast and with a interactive way, so is easy to spot any missing/wrong marker later. (update: I fix some options that where not working on Nuke 7)

FastMarkerRemoval uses 3 inputs, one the plate, one tracker and a roto node (any that has alpha channel), so the first thing is create the track over a marker that want to remove.

Then make a roto node and create a small circle over the marker.

Notice that I made my circle on frame 0 (zero), and keep in mind this because on the tracker we need to put this frame as initial frame for match-moving.

At the transform tab select match-move, and click ‘set to this frame’, so now all is set up, connect to the gizmo all the 3 inputs, I added a Merge node to see how is going to be the final result.

On the FastMarkerRemoval gizmo there are several options:

Interactive: will go to this mode this allow for a easy way to spot from where the gizmo will pick a clean green screen and put it over.

X,Y: are the coordinated where the gizmo will pick the green screen, note that this can be animated as we gonna see it later.
Color Gain: for better matching you can correct the gain and animate it.
Blur: will blur the edges of the roto or mask.
Dissolve: dissolves the patch, this is great when a marker goes behind something and you need to make a jump.

OK. lets see a normal maker removal, enable the interactive and orange circle will appear on top of the marker, with the X,Y sliders move the circle to a clean green screen. Now you just defined from where is going to copy over the patch, turn off the interactive, you can adjust the color and blur a bit the edges(with the blur on the gizmo or add a feather to the roto) then view the merge, done!.

Now let see a jump, where a marker goes behind something.

As soon the marker goes behind we dissolve it to “0”, then when appears on the other side we make it appear, now the markers will appear when is behind the head, so we can use any paint technique to remove in a more detailed way (rotopaint node, patches, silhouette, etc).

Now the problem is that on the frame 27, the marker is coping the clean green image from the left, if we do that on frame 107, it will copy part of her head, to resolve this we animate the X,Y sliders so on that frame when the patch appears again, it will copy from the right.

Also we can use this gizmo to remove several markers at the same time, adding more rotoshapes over the near markers and correct them a bit if they go offset.

*version 1.5 has a new option called Shrink mask, that will shrink the colors to inside, some times are usefull to get those very close markers or to make a quick patch.

I hope this small tutorial makes your work faster. Here you can download the gizmo: