How to remove the same small part from every item in a shot
Ask Vizard Agent to find every appearance of the part before it removes any of them. A pan across a rack of identical units shows the same fitting a dozen times at a dozen sizes, and the ones you did not notice while typing are exactly the ones a single-pass removal leaves behind.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Name the part and say "every". A request naming one plug gets one plug removed perfectly, and Vizard Agent has no reason to look for the others unless you say the part repeats. "The white drain plug on each box" works far better than "the white dot", because it says what shape and material to look for.
Prompt
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
It builds a register of appearances instead of tracking one object, because a plug that is on screen for eleven frames still leaves a visible white dot if it is skipped. It also tests shape, since moulded plastic throws round white highlights of about the right size. In the session behind this article it:
- Split the clip into four parts and ran removals in parallel. One part came back without its picture, so it diagnosed why, abandoned the split and returned to the source file.
- Walked the clip second by second to find every plug position and mapped which plug was visible when.
- Zoomed into each candidate at six, ten, twelve, fourteen and nineteen seconds, and tested shape detection so bright highlights on the plastic were not treated as plugs.
- Removed the plugs with a moving mask while keeping the original audio.
- Measured the residual positions after the render and widened the mask on the largest plug.
- Ran a final contact-sheet check on every plug location, plus motion and audio sync.
When does this not work well?
Some parts can't be removed from every unit equally. A plug at the front of frame has enough surrounding surface to rebuild from. The same plug on a box twenty feet back is a handful of pixels on an edge, and Vizard Agent will often leave it rather than paint a smudge there. Half-occluded parts and heavy motion blur are hard too.
Common questions
Will it find the ones I missed? That is the point of the mapping pass. Vizard Agent walks the clip rather than the description.
What about reflections that look like the part? Vizard Agent tests the shape so highlights on the plastic are not removed.
Does the audio survive? Yes. Vizard Agent keeps the original track through the picture work.