Repairing In-Camera Blue Channel Problem

[Matthew Keane]

Hi,

I’m wondering if somebody out there has some ideas: I have some footage from a BetaSP camera tape where intermittant interference appears in the blue channel. It’s looks like the blue channel drops out, sometimes across a few lines, sometimes across the whole screen. The camera has been sent in for repair, but that doesn’t help me with this footage…

Is there a plug-in which would average out the blue channel over a few frames, so that the flickering would be reduced? What other solutions might work?

AE 6.5 Pro, FCP 5

Thanks,
Matthew

[Darby Edelen]

[Matthew Keane] “Is there a plug-in which would average out the blue channel over a few frames, so that the flickering would be reduced? What other solutions might work?”

I think you’d still end up with some odd looking footage, but you could try duplicating the layer and setting all of the RGB channels on the duplicate to Blue (Using Shift Channels). Put an echo and maybe a light blur on this ‘Blue’ layer and then use Set Channels to make the original footage use the duplicate footage as its blue channel.

[Robert Houghton]

If you’re unfamiliar with the ways to do what Dave mentions. You can render out the clip in individual frames (tif, targa, png, etc.) and fix the trouble spots in photoshop by loading each problem frame and the frame before or after it for either cloning or copying purposes. Of course this can be done in AE as well but I would say this version is a bit more old School. 🙂

-Rob

Motion Graphics Animation
Professional & Freelance
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[Matthew Keane]

Thanks for the suggestions. I can see what Dave means about isolating one colour channel, and I’ve done it before for short FX shots, but I have about 7-8 minutes of footage to deal with, and a client who can’t understand why I cringe when I see the footage and want to fix it!

Also, I admit, I was feeling lazy and was hoping to find an easier solution. I was sure I’d read about plug-ins for averaging frames over time, for example for noise removal from low-light security camera footage, which I thought might do the trick if applied to just the blue channel. Not having much luck with my searches though.

Cheers,
Matthew