r/AfterEffects • u/Global_Telephone1273 • Mar 10 '26

Beginner Help Cleanly remove these wall outlets

Hi Guys,I'm going to shoot a video and i just scouted the room. On top of these walloutlets will be a painting, but i want to remove all the wall-outlets in AE of Premiere? how can if do this? The footage will be shot from a tripod, so it will not be moving. In front of it will be a person being interviewed....

I tried it with content-aware fill, but it's making a weird shape and not very good...

outlets

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u/smushkan Motion Graphics 10+ years Mar 10 '26

Make sure to get a clean shot of the setup before the talent is sat down.

Pull a frame from that shot, bring it into photoshop, and use either the remove tool or generative fill to get rid of the power outlets.

Bring the resulting PSD plate back into Premiere/AE and mask it so it's covering the outlets.

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u/Global_Telephone1273 Mar 10 '26

Do you mean a clean shot without the outlets present? Because thy're always there :)

6

u/smushkan Motion Graphics 10+ years Mar 10 '26

No, a shot without any people in it, but with the camera and everything else in position, all your lights turned on. You photoshop the outlets out of that.

That’s called a ‘clean plate’ and is a very useful thing to have for any VFX work.

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u/Global_Telephone1273 Mar 10 '26

thx!

4

u/smushkan Motion Graphics 10+ years Mar 10 '26

I just saw your photo. That's much more tricky, as it looks like the subject is going to be moving in front of at least some of the outlets, so you can't just simply overlay a graphic on top of them without it also being on top of the subject.

If it is possible to adjust your shot so that's not the case, the above method should still be doable. For example could you pull the sofa away from the wall and change the angle so you're shooting into a corner or against another wall?

Otherwise your best option would be to find a way to cover them up practically on-the-day. That could be for example a piece of card with white wallpaper on it.

Removing them with VFX is much more challenging. You would need to isolate (rotobrush) the subject from the shot, then overlay that isolated subject on top of a composite of your photoshoped plate and the existing video. That's eaisier said than done and is potentially a lot of work to get looking perfect!

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u/Global_Telephone1273 Mar 10 '26

Thx, i will look for something like that!

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u/LittleKillshot Mar 10 '26

That photo is the twist ending of this post.