Here's How To Remove the Line from Shots on Wiral LITE

Watch our quick tutorial to learn how to edit out the line from your cable camera footage, so you don’t have to place the line outside the frame of the shot.

If you’ve been using Wiral LITE for some time I’m sure you’ve found that the Quickreel line works well with most settings and backgrounds. While shooting on location, the line stands out enough to facilitate filming in busy settings and close to people, yet it’s subtle enough to blend well into the background in most shots. Of course, sometimes, depending on what you’re using the video for, you may want to consider an additional step in post-production: line removal.

How you position the camera determines whether the line is even visible in the shot or not. In some cases, the line will be out of frame, so nothing there for you to remove. But this doesn’t apply to every shot, and moreover — there’s no need to put a limit on how you frame your shot just so you could avoid the line being visible.

So whether you’re working on a film project, practicing your mountain biking runs, or capturing a motion timelapse of a beautiful sunset, you can give your shots some extra polish by removing the line from the background altogether.

We’ll show you how we do it, and how you can too — in just a few super-quick steps!

Does the line have to determine your shot?

Today I’ve got Eivind, our Creative Director with us, and he’ll show you how to remove the line from your Wiral LITE footage. If you’d rather follow the instructions in video format, check out Eivind’s full video tutorial at the bottom of this post.

As I already mentioned, you probably already have an idea on how to frame your shots to best tell the story you’re creating. So framing is more likely to be dictated by your creative decisions and storytelling needs than anything else, right?

Should you discard a shot because the line is visible in it? We think not.

You may have an idea for a shot, but think you can’t make it because it’s impossible to place the line out of frame. Or, while reviewing the shots you make, discard a cool one just because you noticed the line in the frame.

Luckily, with the help of a nifty little plug-in called CC Simple Wire Removal in After Effects, you don’t have to plan your frame around where the line is.

Should you edit first or remove the line, then edit?

To get things started, you have two options.

One is to apply the Wire Removal effect to your footage, after which you can move on to edit the material in whichever editing program you use for your videos.

The second method, which is the one Eivind is a big fan of, is to first edit the footage in Premiere Pro, then load the files into After Effects and apply the Wire Removal effect to it.

Here’s why: By making the edit as close to how you want it to look in the end first, you’ll know exactly how much of the shot featuring the line you’ll need. This saves you time and effort you would have put into removing the line from the entire clip, before knowing how much of it ends up in the final video.

How to remove the line in After Effects with Wire Removal plug-in?

Open After Effects, then select CC Simple Wire Removal effect from the Effects & Presets panel, and drag it onto your clip.

Adjust the two markers (highlighted yellow in the photo) so that they are aligned with the line you want to remove.

The line will disappear when you adjust the thickness parameter. We tend to use the thickness of 11 to 14 for this effect.

Keyframe the points to apply the effect to each frame

Not so fast, you’re not done yet.

As you may have noticed, the program won’t automatically remember to follow the line in the video and remove it in each frame. So you’ll need to keyframe the markers.

To do this, toggle Point A and Point B and keyframe each frame, or every few frames.

How many frames you want to add is up to you – we recommend keyframing every 1 to 5 frames. The more time you have to play around with it, the better it will look.

And that’s it – you’re done!

Bonus Tip

While the Wire Removal tool is a super easy and quick solution, it does have limitations. For example, we recommend that you avoid the wire going over faces and other wires.