dust spot on video clip

[Shane Ross]

There were plugins for stuff like this, like from Digital Heaven. But because this software is 9 years End of Life, not sure you can find them anymore…

Shane
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[Mark Suszko]

The answer here is to track the footage and apply a patch to it, or paint it out, one frame at a time. I’ve done it both ways and tracking is going to be easier. I’m not going to tell you to dump seven. I will tell you to go buy Apple Motion. It’s cheap and will turbo-charge everything you are doing in seven. It as an easy to use tracker that will track the dust spot from frame to frame and let you apply a patch a few pixels wide to that spot.

If you ae a glutton for drudgery work, you could do everything in seven. How I’d do it back then was, Make a second identical video track. Offset it in time by maybe 1 or 2 frames. Apply the multi-point or shape mask tool to the dust spot area, tight as a you can, but feather the edge of the mask to blend it into to the layer below. Because the track below is a frame or too off, it is exposing clean pixels from almost the same region. If the subject isn’t moving too much, this could work fo ra very short shot. I had to do the same thing to get rid of a shmutz in someone’s hair.

The other way I used to do it was to export the frames of the shot as a “frame movie” of stills and bring that into photoshop, where I’d hand-airbrush each frame. Export the altered frame movie back out and drop it back over the original layer. You need zen master patience and the ability to stay focused fora long time, to do “roto” work like this. If time = money to you, upgrade… or buy Motion. or get Resolve, which is free, and it has these tools as well as a tracker. Some folks say it feels a lot like what Seven’s next upgrade would have been.

[Nick Meyers]

hi Art,
yes that’s relatively doable in FCP.
(Art sent me a clip, so i have seen the shot – the spot is static, the image moves)
it’s tricky because its on a face which is where our human brains tell us to look,
plus the talent is moving around a fair bit.
FCP is old of course so no IA to help, just manual labour
and a perfect fix will probably require a fair bit of work, especially if its a long IV.
but ther are manny levels of what might be acceptable, and hopefully you can fix this to your satisfaction.

FWIW, i had a series of shots in film recently where the image had up to 16 spots!,
plus it was handheld with a moving background.
we did fix the shot

the basics are that you double the shot up onto V2,
and apply a 4-point garbage matte to the top layer.
you’ll want to zoom the canvas up quite a bit as this spot is really very small.
a touch of smoothing and feathering in the garbage matte will help

so now the spot is a hole, thru which you see the same shot underneath.
and the trick is to just off-set that V1 shot ever so much so that you are basically seeing a neighbouring pixel thru the hole, hopefully rendering it invisible.

MOVING, NUDGING
select the shot on v1, in the canvas turn on image & Wireframe in the drop-down menu near the top of the canvas. one of three, it looks like a frame.
better yet, the W key will toggle image & Wireframe; easier than going to that menu.
with the shot selected you can move the wireframe it in the canvas, OR
use Option + Arrow Keys to nudge (i think its a pixel at a time)
you have to be in the Canvas for this to work, otherwise you’ll just nudge the shot around n the timeline.

HOWEVER, as the talent moves their head around the will be times when the hole get lighter / darker than it;s surrounding pickles,, and becomes noticeable again.
there probably won’t be a magic offset for the V1 shot that covers all possible head positions.
What i did was find an offset that worked for the majority of the shot, then where it didn’t work, i bladed that section, and just nudged V1 into a new spot.

there’s plug in that i use for spot removal
the plugin was in a free set from TooMuch Too soon, which is is still available on line.
i used the “Hair” plugin, designed for concealing an errant hair-in-the-gate.
but its hardly less manual than what I’m suggesting, and with this guy moving around a lot, from my own experience i know my first method is a lot easier.

FCP doesn’t offer a suer speedy solution, but it is possible.

all the best,
nick

[Mark Suszko]

Seems to be an echo in here 🙂

[Art Smith]

Hi Mark,
Thank you very much for your response and advice. I’m hoping all the tips I’m
getting will resolve the issue.
Will Apple Motion work with FinalCut 7?
Thank you again for your support,
Cheers,
Art

[Art Smith]

Thank you Shane for your response. I’m impressed with the feedback I have been given by all respondents and will keep you updated on what transpires in the next few days with this challenging task.
Cheers,
Art

[Art Smith]

I was able to remove the spot with adobe premiere after effects. My son fortunately
has the program and was able to figure it out. He did not clone it nor did he mask it but
found another way to do it. Thank you for your suggestion. I think i was going to
have to follow your 3rd idea which was to hand brush each frame separate from the rest. The
zen master patience I don’t have. And there was no money on the line here.

[Mark Suszko]

I’m guessing the new healing brush tool or the sensei-powered AI blemish remover or similar tool. Which is an easy way out but we were assuming you demanded to do everything inside of seven.