spot cleaning with DH-Reincarnation?

[John Fishback]

DH_Reincarnation will only affect an 8×8 pixel area. You might be able to apply a few instances of it to work with larger areas. Another thought is to duplicate the video layer and put it on the track above. Apply some blur to it, use a matte and play with different blend modes to see if that helps.

John

MacPro 8-core 2.8GHz 8 GB RAM OS 10.5.8 QT7.6.4 Kona 3 Dual Cinema 23 ATI Radeon HD 3870, 24″ TV-Logic Monitor, ATTO ExpressSAS R380 RAID Adapter, PDE enclosure with 8-drive 6TB RAID 5
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[Mark Suszko]

I’m always suggesting photoshop for people that don’t have higher-powered dedicated paint/roto tools. You could output the frames as a stills sequence or frame movie, open these pics in photoshop, and use that healing brush to fix the blemished area, then re-import to the timeline. If the spot doesn’t move, you can also do this “relatively” quickly by recording the steps as you do the first frame and saving that as a batch action or droplet. The rest of the frames will then be done for you in jig time. Well, maybe mazurka time. 🙂 Roto or paint in photoshop was what it was originally invented for; it is slow and painstaking in many cases, but it’s a tool many folks already have and sometimes, you have to work with what you have on hand. The Digital Heaven tool might also work for your problem, if the spots are really small.

I seem to recall a Boris efects tutorial a while back that showed how to offset and mask around an obstruction in a tracking shot. If you haev Boris, you might want to look that up for some ideas.

[Mirjam Letsch]

Thank you all for your suggestions.

Mark, I have photoshop CS4 extended and know how to use the healing brush etc. But I don’t understand how to output the frames as a stills sequence or frame movie…

Can you only help me out here?

Because as I understand it now (even if you use a droplet or action), a clip of 2 minutes would mean editing more than 2800 images (frames)… Or do I completely misunderstand?

Thanks,
Mirjam

https://www.mirjamletsch.com

[Mark Suszko]

Oh, you understand it, all right.:-)

I’m suggesting this mostly because you implied that the shot was fairly static. Automation is easier if you don’t have to do tracking of any sort. If the shot moves by more than a frame or two, you may well have to go frame-by frame on it. That’s something I don’t seem to mind, long as I have my beverages, snacks, Wacom tablet, an empty bladder and a fully-charged ipod to hand. It becomes a very Zen thing for me and I find the time passes surprisingly fast. Even if the frames move too much to fully automate, you can still automate a macro of steps and apply that to a quickly-selected area and save a lot of time that way. But yes, it could wind up taking a long time, and only you can decide how much time is worth the results. Try a test segment on 30 or so frames and then evaluate.

I work in FCP, and how I do this is, mark the shortest section you can possibly get away with, in and out. Export>using Quicktime conversion>select “image sequence” then I go with targas or tiffs, myself. All those go in their own folder.

In photoshop, open the first image, practice fixing it with the healing brush, undo it, then this time, turn on the action recorder and record all the steps. Make the last action a “save-over and close” the same file. Stop the recording and assign a recognizable name to the action like: “My lens flare custom action”. You can then apply that action to the entire folder, read the online help files in photoshop or google “photoshop batch actions” for details on batch actions. They tell it more clearly than I can in brief.

When the batch is done and saved, I go back to Final Cut, make a new bin, and I make sure to set the duration of imported graphics to one frame only. When the doctored frames are done, they retain a 1:1 correspondence with the section of the timeline you marked previously. You can import the folder to your project, select>all and drag/drop them into the marked space, or into a track just above it. If in a track above, you can play with additional tricks like blend modes and opacity to mix the two tracks together or mask it off to limit the effect.

I’m not saying this is the best way to do it, just that it is how I have done it in the past. I had to do the same masking and filter application to 30 seconds’ worth of frames to make it have a cartoon look once. A simple plug-in wouldn’t do it the way I needed, but after taking at least 2 days to hand-process each frame, I went back and used a batch action and got much more consistent results and the entire batch was done in less than five minutes. Minutes.

Batch actions are powerful.

[Mirjam Letsch]

Dear Mark,

Thank you very much for your detailed step-by-step answer, that really helps me. Now I understand the procedure and will give it a try. The snacks and filled ipod is not the problem…. my client is!

Will let you know if it worked 😉

Have a nice day!
Mirjam

https://www.mirjamletsch.com

[Mirjam Letsch]

Hi Mark and others,

I cannot be the only one having a dustspot on my footage… and just when I prepared myself for cloning thousands of frames in Photoshop, I found this:

https://www.chv-plugins.com/cms/Fx-Script/CloneAndPaint-collection/Clone.php

It looks promising…

Since it may help other desparate editors as well, I like to share the link with you. Now I go and try this plugin!

Mirjam

https://www.mirjamletsch.com

[Mike Sweet]

Very interested to hear more on this topic Mark – if there is any. My problem is that the frame is constantly moving, meaning a (seemingly) infinite number changing colours-luminances etc (though the spot at least stays in the same place in the frame itself. I guess with the Photoshop solution using batches – thse have to be completed batch by batch – where the image behind the spot in question is constant enough for the clone tool to be consistently repairing it properly. Of course once the background changes, the clone tool would be cloning inappropriately. Any more thoughts gratefully appreciated. This is for an indie broadcast documentary for broadcast.