Can I remove glare from a clip?

[Mark Suszko]

Remove? Not in a practical sense.
Reduce? Somewhat.

When the digital image has an area of blown-out white, you have no data in the burned area. One thing you can try is to use the 3- way color corrector to try and mitigate the hot spots, by selsctively darkening or tinting them, but again, this cannot by itself replace the missing video information in the burned area. This is why I always say it is better to slightly under-expose than over-expose digital video when shooting. Under-exposure can be fixed a bit, because you still have bits to fix.

There is a plug-in out there for fixing blown-out shots, it helps a lot, but is not miraculous. Outside of rotoscoping and hand-painting each frame, you might try to sample just the area of the burn and tint the sampled area from an adjacent flesh tone area, using partial opacity and blend modes. This might wind up callign more attention to itself than leaving it alone. Depending on the framing, maybe you can crop the shot?

If you could post a still frame here, you might get some better advice abotu how to repair it.

[Sam Ellens]

I agree with everything Mark says, but as he says nothing is going to give you a miracle. You can’t make it good, just less bad. Unless you have a lot of experience and a lot of free time.

also, I’m going to be using
“Under-exposure can be fixed a bit, because you still have bits to fix. ”
when I need to talk to underexperienced cameramen I’m working with. Good line.

Post a still so we can see how bad it is.

Sam Ellens
Intern – Zamasti Films
4th year at Ryerson University – Radio and Television Arts

My system: iMac 21.5 3.06GhZ 4GB

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
This preview of Photoshop CS5 offers some hope…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH0aEp1oDOI

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[Suhaimi Baruddin]

Thanks for the response guys.

Unfortunately, it needed to have a quick fix (can’t post the video as it was someone pretty high up and done in confidentiality) so I had to make it less bad so to speak.

Lucky for me the glare didn’t move. The bad part was that since it was an interview video, the glare looke like a white spot on his forehead, and since he does turn his head a bit covers his hair.

So I masked the spot just below that white mar in After Effects, though I guess you can do in FCP too, and covered the spot, blurred and put some filter to slightly blur the image under the pretex of making the image “warm” : )

Not the best solution, but hey, it worked. Client’s happy with it, so far anyways.