H.P. - VFX Object Removal

In a couple of our shots over our shoots so far we have encountered the issue of having a shot we really like, but it having something in frame which shouldn't have been there, making the shot unusable. In one case it was the shadow of the camera operator, and another it was one of our group's foot. The method of removing these elements is similar in each case, so for the purpose of this post I will only focus on the removal of the foot.

• After importing the original footage, the issue I'm attempting to fix is immediately obvious. The foot in the bottom left corner. When we first spotted this issue after shooting we were hoping that we could crop it with the cinematic bars we have been adding to the video, however the foot moves and is often inline with the parts of eleanor's hands that we want in the shot, so this was no longer an option.
• I began by using the 3D Camera Tracker to generate a number of tracking points on the footage, and I selected one on the floor near the foot and right clicked to create a Null Object and Camera.

• I then took a screenshot of the frame and imported this back into the project. Using the mask tool with the Roto-bezier option selected, I cut out and area of ground from the top right, roughly the same size as the area where the foot was. I used the roto-bezier option to create a smooth, curved mask rather than a straight edged one because this reduced the artificial look of the effect, making it less obvious.

• An important part of the masking was setting the feather radius to 30 pixels, as this effectively blended the two images.

• I positioned this area over the foot and used the whip tool to parent the screenshot layer to the Null Object. I checked the 3D object option on the screenshot layer to allow it to move in 3D space.

• Finally I applied a Gaussian Blur effect at 10.2 blurriness to the screenshot area as the area I remove it from was more in-focus than the area I place it over.

• The final effect was very effective and can only be spotted if the viewer knows exactly where it is and is looking for it.