Changing the lifetime to “All” works fine for me, not sure why that’s happening for you, have you selected a stroke you want to set the lifetime for?
That said, changing this on a per-stroke basis is usually time consuming and not the way to go. I like to do all my paint work on one frame and then frame hold it.
Timing aside the workflow is as follows:
- Degrain your footage!
- Create your clean-plate and remove what you need to with the rotopaint node and the framehold node after that to keep it all constant.
- Usually I like to make a seperate roto node using my masking setup and mask out the element from the again instead of using the rotopaint alpha but you can do this too, you just need the element itself and none of the original plate. It’s also important that we have an alpha here to work with in steps 5 and 6 which you won’t always have when using a mask merge operation with a merge node, if you’re doing it this way instead make sure to shuffle the alpha from your roto into your patch so that it has an alpha channel.
- Do any tracking (I know you don’t need to but this is where you’d do that)
- Regrain the element and match the grain to the source footage. This means that the grain will move like normal and the patch will look like it’s actually always been a part of the footage when really it hasn’t because we’re sneaky VFX people. If you don’t do this and the degrain step earlier other parts of the image with film grain will be moving but your patch will be static and it’s a dead giveaway that you’ve removed something.
- Merge into your main pipe, that’s it!