Transparenty-blurry smudge on my footage, can I remove it in post or am I completely screwed?

[Kristyn Woods]

These are stills from the video…

[Shane Ross]

Screwed. Because it moves, and it blocks different subjects all the time. You’d have to paint it out…frame by frame…with the same color/shading that it’s in front of.

Shane
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[Mark Suszko]

Shane is correct that you can’t make this an “invisible” repair. Other than rotoscope-painting each frame, the only other thing I can suggest is that the blotch would look less obvious if it wasn’t always bright white, so using a mask and power window in a program like Apple Color or Da Vinci, you could set up an effect to colorize the white area to match the color of the pixels around it, so instead of a flare it just looks like a transparent blur. This should be relatively easy to set up since this spot never changes its position in the frame.

[Jerry Wise]

you could add a lens flare filter on top of the smudge and tell everbody it’s a creative effect.

[Mark Suszko]

Also, how do you MISS a smudge that big? Did this camera not have a viewfinder or monitor?

[Mark Suszko]

Here is very quick and dirty example of what color-correcting the splat area using color sampled from the closest pixels could do:

I used Paul Crisp’s 8-point matte generator to create a matte shaped like the splat; I feathered and softened the edge, applied it to a duplicate layer then used the 3-wy color corrector on it. Using Apple Color would do an even better job, I’m sure.

Even so, while you can still tells something’s amiss, it is no longer as blatant and eye-drawing as it was. You can use a similar technique to blur out time code overlays and logos.