[Brannon Bain]

Actually, there are lower-thirds with the correct phone number that appear at regular intervals throughout the program, and have been appearing there for almost 25 years. Despite the fact that the incorrect phone number only appears in 36 of 994 episodes, people still manage to call the wrong number, which actually goes to another client. If simply putting a lower-third would have resolved the issue, I wouldn’t have dedicated time to finding an actual solution. Thanks.

[Brannon Bain]

Okay. Thanks to everyone for the suggestions. I have been trying the “Keying” solution with mixed results.

Turns out that I have 36 episodes like this, so the “roto-ing” solution just won’t be practical in the amount of time I have available.

Here are some examples of my results:

Here, the keyed out mask looks pretty good –

It’s not too bad in this shot –

I am getting a lot of noisiness in the key, which is pretty distracting while the video is playing. Here, you can see an example of dark speckling over the 69 –

And the worst part is the times when the darker parts of the head drift into the number –

If anyone has any suggestions on how I might improve these results, it would be greatly appreciated. This project is killing me…. slowly…. and painfully…

Thanks

[Brannon Bain]

Thanks for the suggestion, Steve.

I actually played with keying a bit, but that is one area I am lacking in knowledge, so my results have been pretty poor. Based on your suggestion I will keep experimenting with it, though.

[Brannon Bain]

Walter,

I was afraid of that. Here is an image of what I am working with.

As you can see, the phone number is behind his head. The 369 section of the number used to read 324. fixing the number is no big deal using a simple mask, but whenever his head passes in front of the 369 portion of the number is when I need to mask him so a chunk of his head doesn’t disappear into the mask for the number.