Getting rid of film dirt

[Tom Bridges]

Wouldn’t it be lovely to have some basic paint tools?

Sadly not. Photoshop’s probably your best bet for dust-busting on a budget. The Heal tool works really well, but it’s generally very time consuming. I believe AE and Combustion are pretty good, too, but I’ve been lazy and haven’t investigated properly. Higher-end, there are dedicated programs like Mokey, PFClean, Shake and so on.

Hope that helps,

Tom

Split Image
http://www.split-image.co.uk

[Bret Williams]

For just a frame or two, why not duplicate the layer above itself, and on the upper layer crop in on a small area that is similar to the area that needs fixing, then move that area over the white spec. Usually the area would be immediately adjacent to the spec if possible. Just like the clone tool in photoshop.

But if you have tons of little specs everywhere this probably isn’t a great solution.

[John Pale]

take a look at this….its for replacing dead pixels by cloning…but it should be able to do the same thing for your problem

https://www.digital-heaven.co.uk/fcplugins/dh_reincarnation.php

[Bret Williams]

Hmm… except film dirt doesn’t stay in the same place like that. But that is one cool plugin. I’ve never heard of dead pixels on a camera. That’s pretty much the end of a camera.

[John Pale]

I think you can keyframe the location of the cloning. Not saying it would not be tedious, but it could be done.

[Jeffrey Weiser]

Thanks. I saw all those plug ins — very worth having. I ended up exporting to Photoshop, using the blur tool and importing back to FCP. It looks perfect. Lesson learned– never shoot out your film roll. Stop 10 seconds before and change mags. All the dirt was on takes at the end of the load. Even the best lab and telecine house in the country couldn’t get it perfectly clean.

[Max Frank]

This is exactly what you need:

https://www.chv-plugins.com/clone.html

https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/review_chv_clone_plugin.html

Wayne K.