Use the original footage as the protected base when the crowd must remain visually unchanged. Replace only the lead’s reviewed region through a supported editing or compositing workflow. A whole-frame regeneration can interpret the crowd again even if the prompt asks it to remain unchanged. Define protected pixels and necessary overlap repairs before treating the result as faithful preservation.
Inspect what the lead covers
The original lead may hide parts of the crowd or stage. Removing that person does not reveal a recorded background underneath. You need another source view, a suitable clean plate or a clearly identified reconstruction for newly exposed areas. Do not describe an invented crowd face as preserved original footage.
Adobe’s rotoscoping documentation concerns isolating regions over time. The broader production choice is to keep the base and replacement separable. It requires an appropriate external compositor; it is not an assertion of an Imagild pixel-lock feature.
Define a protected-region test
- Save the original full-frame video and its timing.
- Mark the intended lead-replacement region through the shot.
- Identify overlaps where a crowd member must pass in front of the lead.
- Assemble the replacement over the preserved base with reviewed masks.
- Compare protected areas before and after, accounting for documented encoding changes.
For a camera-locked scene, fixed background details provide useful comparison anchors. For a moving camera, keep the original base time-aligned; do not compare unrelated frames. Compression can change values, so first check obvious content changes and then use aligned technical comparisons when appropriate.
Review the boundaries as part of preservation
The crowd can remain intact while the lead has a cutout edge, duplicate shadow or incorrect overlap. Those are still failures of the composite. Inspect the full scene and close boundary crops, then watch the normal-speed result with original timing before considering it ready.
Can I preserve the crowd with a reference photograph?
A photograph can describe appearance, but cannot supply every time-varying crowd pixel or action. Keeping original video pixels requires a workflow that actually retains them.
What if the replacement is wider than the original lead?
It may cover crowd information that was originally visible. Check whether that change is acceptable and whether the overlap order remains coherent. A prompt cannot guarantee that a different silhouette will preserve every original visibility relationship.
Sources and scope
This is an original Imagild Editorial workflow guide, assisted by AI and reviewed against the linked sources on October 12, 2026. External tool procedures do not imply that Imagild provides those tools or guarantees their results.