dirty lens

[Michael Szalapski]

If your question is if you can remove it in Final Cut Pro or Color, perhaps you should ask in one of those forums.

You may be able to remove it in After Effects without too much trouble. If you want AE help, could you post a still for an example so we can see what you’re working with?

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Ironic how the lens cleaning cloth caused the issue…

It’s possible that the actually thread sits still on the lens. I’ve seen it happen. If so, a bit of CC wire removal should take care of it without too much work.

We didn’t ask how picture perfect this needs to be; perhaps all we need is an adjustment layer to put a small blur over that area of the screen.

We also didn’t ask where on the picture this errant piece of cloth is; perhaps, if it’s on the edge of the picture, with a bit of scaling and positioning we can make it go away.

Alternatively we could use this strand of cloth to our advantage. Perhaps if we decide this piece needs a vintage look. We can add lots of fibers, scratches, etc. to get the old film look and maybe in all the noise it’ll look like part of the design.

Or, rather than the busy frantic movement of old film damage, perhaps we could go with a texture of some description; like the video is printed on old paper – à la Harry Potter’s newspapers.

Or perhaps it’s in a location that could be covered up by a logo of some sort. Again, we’re not sure what kind of piece this is or where the thread spends the majority of its time.

However, I’m inclined to agree with you. Most cases of this need to be reshot or take a lot of time to fix. It’s bad enough taking curved telephone wires that don’t move out of cloud timelapse video (bad directing…long story) much less something that’s curved and moving around.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Chris Wright]

The cc simple wire remover can use its “slope” to get around small curves, but 180 curves require more duplicates.

[Peter Litwinowicz]

If the thread stays still, and it’s not more than a couple pixels (or so) wide, you can create a small black and white matte for where the thread is on the lens, then use our RE:FIll to fill back in the corrupted pixels.

There is a free demo version. Make sure to look for the manual that’s put on your disk when you install.

Overview: https://www.revisionfx.com/products/refill/
Demo version: https://www.revisionfx.com/products/refill/downloads/
Price: $99.95.

Cheers,
Pete LItwinowicz
RE:Vision Effects, Inc.
https://www.revisionfx.com

[Jamison Luther]

Glad I found this thread and thank to RE:Vision for their post. I just was able to use RE:Fill successfully to remove a small piece of dirt that was going right through my subjects face and white dress for multiple crucial shots. No reshoots possible on a wedding shoot!

Wish it was less than $99, since I just dropped $350 on Twixtor. Package pricing or repeat customer discounts would be really appreciate in these times.

Thanks for the solution!