Collage (The Digital Advantage) - Frame-by-Frame Stop Motion: The Guide to Non-Traditional Animation Techniques - page 134

Fig 10.7 a shot of a clean plate next to the same composition with a foreground element.

Your support rig should have a minimum of junctions with the animated
object or person. Ideally, you only want one intersection of the support
rig and the animated object. This makes the cleanup go much faster. If
your object is near a wall or someplace where the animated object casts
a shadow, then you want to make sure that, during the shooting, the rig
does not cross the shadow area of the animated object. The shadow is
very difficult to replace, because the clean plate does not have the same
shadow in it.

Fig 10.8 the ideal rig support placement. Fig 10.9 too many junctions with the rig and object, with the

rig covering the object shadow.

Several different programs and techniques can be used to clean rig supports,
but to get the principle across, I use Photoshop as the demonstration tool.
Programs like After Effects are ideal for this kind of work, because they utilize
the power of layering from Photoshop, but they do it more efficiently in a
timeline. If you captured your animated scene on a flash card or in a program
like Dragon, then you have all of your shots in a folder sequentially numbered.
Dragon exports these images to a Quicktime movie, but you have to import
the images from a flash card to a program like Final Cut or Quicktime Pro, using
the image sequence option for exporting to a movie. Before you make your
final movie from the scene, you have to remove those cumbersome rigs. This
has to be done frame by frame. In Photoshop, you can use some shortcuts,
like “batch” processing frames. In the new extended version of Photoshop, you