Removing photo flashes from video

[Steve Rhoden]

The only plugin that i know of, for Vegas that handles that,
is in NewbluFX (Which you are already using).

Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Film Editor & Compositor.
Filmex Creative Media.
1-876-832-4956

[Mikhail Petrushin]

Thanks.
Right now I’ve removed these flashes by duplicating previous and/or next frames.
Unfortunately, I don’t know how to apply motion blur to duplicates frames yet, but even without it I like results.

[Joe Mantaratz]

This is time consuming but you can do it manually but it of course wont be perfect because you will have to delete those frames and add the copied frames.
If you have single flashes you are fortunate it you have multiple that is far more difficult.

A flash will only last a few frames and so you will have to zoom in on the media track and find where the flash begins and ends. Copy the frame immediately before and after then copy them to fill in the gap working towards the middle of the gap. You don’t want to just copy and paste the first clear frame and keep pasting that one as it will become more jittery or appear slowed, you want to use both ends to work towards the middle. Hope that makes sense and I am sorry there is no easy answer here. A small crossfade can do wonders here you would be surprised. Again it wont be perfect but it may do the trick.

[Mikhail Petrushin]

I have 50p footage and flashes had one-frame or two-frames length only.
The hardest task was to find them using my eyes. Plugin could do it much faster. Totally I removed around 40 flashes and it took a few hours for me (I’m novice with Vegas so I made some mistakes that ruined some of my works).

With one frame flash I copied one previous frame.
With two-frames flash I copied one previous frame and one next frame.

On resulting video I can spot the different during playback because I know where these flashes were. However, my wife couldn’t see any jerkiness (thanks to 50p, I think).
I think that someday I will be able to add some motion blur on modified areas so the jerkiness will be even less noticeable.
Thank you for idea about cross-fade. I’ll try it for sure.

As I already said, I’ve tried NewBlue Flash Remover plugin. I spent some time playing with threshold option, but couldn’t find a good value. The plugin modified more frames around flashes and unfortunately it made some ‘backward movements’ (I don’t know why). On resulting video the jerkiness was more visible for me.

[Mikhail Petrushin]

I’ve compared 3 methods of removing flashes: NewBlue Flash Remover, frames duplication and frames resampling.

I’ve found that Flash Remover’s result even worse that simple frame duplication. Right now I’m using frame resampling method (quite complicated but no additional plugins are required).

I’ve published post in my blog where I described these methods and made small video tutorial. zip file with source, 3 results and Vegas project file is also available there.

I hope it could be usable for somebody else.

[Edward Troxel]

Excalibur can do this using the “Fix Bad Frame” tool It can be use to duplicate from a previous frame or the next frame. If you had two bad frames in a row, you would need to run with the previous frame for the first frame replace and the next frame for the second frame replace.

Edward Troxel

[Mikhail Petrushin]

Thanks for the information.
I was already told that Vegasaur can do it as well.
However, frame duplication doesn’t look as good as resampling (just download zip and look at results).
Also, you have to buy Excalibur or Vegasaur if you like to use them 🙂