Removing hairs and dirt

[David Roth weiss]

All of the very best tools for doing this job work on exactly the same principle, which is to replace the area of bad pixels from the present frame with good pixels from either the preceding or the next frame. If you only have a few instances that require fixing, you can do exactly the same thing yourself manually in FCP with the matte filter and the soft edge filter. Just duplicate the video layer to a second track, and advance or delay the video by one frame, and create a tiny matte around the object on the top layer that you wish to make transparent in order for the good pixels below to show through. However, if you have lots of fixes to make, this will become very tedious very quickly, and you’ll need a specialized app or filter for the job.

So, before proceeding, why not tell us, how much cleaning up do you have to do?

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.

[Arnie Schlissel]

If you have Photoshop Extended (sold separately or bundled with AE, Flash and Premiere) you can open up a QT movie and use the clone brush to paint these out. PS extended will allow you to paint from one frame into a different frame. The PS manual explains this, it’s slightly complicated.

Arnie
Post production is not an afterthought!
https://www.arniepix.com/

[Neil Sadwelkar]

David is right about replacing from preceeding/succeding frames. In fact, to make this easy, Mattias has written very useful and free plug-in called Too Much Too Soon. Here…

https://www.mattias.nu/plugins/

I use them all the time and have made a small donation to him for it.

If the dirt and hair is heavy, the most cost-effective solution is Furnace from Foundry. Get a demo and check it out.
https://www.thefoundry.co.uk

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Jonathan Salemi]

Thanks for the responses guys!

Yeah, I’ve heard about Photoshop and the clone tool. I’m just trying to figure out what the best method is to use. I lock picture in about 4 weeks…so I have some time to research before I need to clean it up.

In regards to how much I have, I do have quite a few hairs and a fair amount of dirt…but not too much. My running time will probably come in around 6:09 (short film) which is good that it’s a short and not a feature. But I’d say 50% of the film has a small amount of dirt passing through it.

FotoKem mentioned to me that they could run a DRS on it. So, I’m not sure if I should do the DRS first and then clean up the rest by hand…I think they charge about $300 an hour for that service.

Look forward to your responses. Either way, I know I’m going to have to do a bunch by hand…which I don’t mind. I mean what’s that, only 10,000 frames? Kidding.

[Bouke Vahl]

I’ve cleaned up some 16 hour of movies (some VERY old).
I’ve used a couple of passes.
First pass was finding the cuts. (That’s why i made my Cutfinder app)
Next step was FlickerFixer (perhaps not needed for you)
Then Dirt remover. This works wonders in SOME cases.
But it does not like fire, fast motion (birds and stuff), sparkles and everything that makes a movie interesting.
Those two plugins can be found here:
https://www.redgiantsoftware.com/productdownloads.html
(And they only work on seperate shots, and need 2 frames extra on the start)
Oh, and the dirt removing is SLOW. For SD, think about 100 times RT,
even on a fast computer.

Now all this work needs manual attention. (mask in the original where the plugin did things wrong)

Last step was manually cleaning up in Photoshop.
For that i’ve written an application to control a QT from within Photoshop. With one keystroke you can get a frame with it’s previous or next frame into Photoshop, correct it and another single keystroke to get it back into the QT. (on another track, so it’s non-destructive)
The imporant part is that you need to see the movie in motion to decide what is dirt, and what is a flashing light in the bt, or an insect or whatever.
It is a hell of a job (we spent about a year on doing 16 hours, but we had massive corrections to do), your work will be faster 🙂

The Photoshop tool is windows only at the moment. But you can have it if you like.
it can be downloaded here:
https://www.videotoolshed.com/?page=products&pID=31
I have no idea if it is the latest version, as i’ve constantly updated it when we worked with it.
But good to have a look at.
(I also don’t know if there is a demo limitation or not, but i’ll make it available for free if someone wants it)

Bouke

https://www.videotoolshed.com/
smart tools for video pro’s