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How to remove light reflection from glass/window?
Hey,
I am a senior in high school currently working on a video portfolio for my NYU application (Very last minute I know). I have the equipment from my Digital Media class at my place for over Christman break & its currently 4:20 AM where I am so I cant ask my teacher & I am hardly an expert on Final Cut yet. SO….My question is this: I have a shot looking in a window at night, everything looks fine while the window is open, & then BAM when the actor closes the window there is freakin square blue reflection of the camera’s View screen in the shot. What is the best way (If any) to get rid of it?
(Reshoot is impossible)
Here’s a freeze frame of it:
sorry its so small I’m working on dial up here. No I’m not kidding.
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9 Replies
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By no means am I an expert on this, but I think this type of problem would need a scene by scene paint job. How many frames is the shot?
-Craig
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Scene by scene and frame by frame. if the camera is moving, you can use Motion Track on the artifacts in Motion to drive the locations of the attempts you make to hide them.
This is a complicated and no-win project. Without experience and superb hand-painting abilities, whatever you do will probably look worse than leaving the reflections.
If this is the only shot you need to correct, it’s still likely to be difficult and ugly. There are only a few things you can do, cover them spots or try to disguise them.
Covering them requires replacing the pixels with something on an upper video track that will appear seamless.
You can punch a hole in your layer using a mask that is the exact shape as the artifacts and that reveals your replacement image in a lower track. How you create that replacement footage is up to you and your skills.
You can attempt to disguise them with blurs and blending modes either with or without masking.The execution of these techniques is beyond the capacity of these little posties. You can explore the cow’s search function for tutorials in the FCP, Motion, and AE sections for things like “cop blur” and related items. The techniques can be readily adapted to your problem.
bogiesan
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I would have to say that this is an After Effects job. Masking in FCP is quite hard and getting it clean is even harder in FCP.
-Raymond Tuquero-
Houston Based Freelancer
http://www.rtuqvidere.com -
[Raymond Tuquero] “I would have to say that this is an After Effects job. Masking in FCP is quite hard and getting it clean is even harder in FCP.
“Yes but I’m assuming the OP has neither time nor resources to go to After Effects. It’s readily done in Motion but even that is a stretch if one reads between the lines.
bogiesan
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David’s advice is sound. Without time and experience, this will be a difficult shot for you to fix, especially within Final Cut Pro.
The golden lining is that if the camera doesn’t move in the shot, it would be a fairly easy task to use a program with great paint tools like Combustion (much better than AE in this case) to replace the sections of the image containing the reflection by using clean plates from an earlier point in the same clip. In Combustion, this would be done using a reveal brush, which “reveals” the same portion of the image at another point in time – in your case, earlier in the clip prior to the window closing. The transition point where the window’s edge crosses the frame might be a bit tricky, but it’s not an impossible shot.
You might actually be able to use a similar method in FCP, but you would need to overlay the same clip over itself offset in time and use garbage masks to limit the area affected. FCP’s garbage masks and keyframing are clunky, blunt objects compared to the tools available in a dedicated compositing application like Combustion.
If the camera is moving during the shot, more powerful software like Imagineer’s Mokey could handle the task.
Good luck.
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I think in this situation it might be OK to see some kind of reflection in the glass, it’s just that it’s bluish and obviously a video monitor. You might be able to get away with a bit of masked color correction rather than replacing the pixels. If you can isolate the bluish rectangles with two 4 point masks and color correct them more toward the other warm tones in the shot, it would make them less noticeable. If you bring down the brightness of the rectangles a bit too you might be able to make them almost disappear.
If the camera is moving it becomes complicated but it is possible to manually track a mask. It takes a lot of patience but it can be done.
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Eric Susch
http://www.LetsKnit2gether.com
http://www.EricSusch.com
Follow me on twitter @EricSusch -
Amen. Simply not being square to the window in the BG would have solved it.
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If this is a static shot, you might be able to clip out a chunk of the frame from just below the reflection and paste it over the reflection. Feather the edge very slightly. It probably wont match perfectly, but if everyone is looking at your actor, and the shot isn’t up long you might get away with it.
Otherwise, Re-Shoot.
Scott -
This won’t get rid of it completely but will help.
Send the shot to Color. In the secondaries room create a “user shape” vignette around the reflection. Adjust the color away from blue to a warmer tone and darken it. Adjust the edge softness of the vignette to suit.If the shot is moving you may need to set up a tracker for the vignette, that’s a little bit more complicated.
Cinematographer, Steadicam Operator, Final Cut Pro Post Production.
https://www.steadi-onfilms.com.au/
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