Blue Spot of death! Argg

Heysues wrote on 10/17/2005, 2:36 AM

I used a friends cam for a wedding shoot recently..

What I didn't notice while i was shooting.. was a faint.. little blue spot that appeared on my monitor as I was loading up the footage..(much more apparent in darker lite scenes)

Obviously.. seems that a pixel went bad on the cam's sensor..

Due to the nature of the malfunction.. it's always in the exact same spot of every frame.. so i am thinking.. hoping.. there's a quick way in vegas to 'blur' out the spot to make it less pronouced..

Stil loading footage on my editing system as i write this.. so haven't experimented with anything yet...

Hoping someone has a nice little 'receipe' to wash out the dot via vegas compositing/fx

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!!

Comments

Grazie wrote on 10/17/2005, 2:48 AM

If it is the Pixie of Death syndrome - I had this 2 months back, camera went into Canon Garage - what I did was to double-up the track, use the Track 1 and locate the pixie-area with a Cookie Cutter; use the circle Cutter and choose "All But"; now offset one of the tracks through Pan/Crop, so that the top track "filled-in" some of the pixels from nearby; play the video and as the the action moves on and you get "coverage" from an area you DON'T want move the Pan/Crop so you can cover with another area. You might also want to put some feather on the Cookie Cutter, just to take out any hard edges. It's good fun too!

Grazie

Jøran Toresen wrote on 10/17/2005, 5:33 AM

Hello
You can use one of these filters in VirtualDub(Mod): DeLogo, Logoaway, MSU Subtitle and Logo Remover, Region Remove.

Besides that, Pure Motion Edit Studio has a nice feature called Knockout that let you remove specific parts of your video (for example a blue spot). I use Edit Studio to remove for example time stamps on my videos.

All these filters try to fill the removed part of your video using the pixels outside the region you remove.

Joran

RBartlett wrote on 10/17/2005, 7:28 AM

Next time you are booking an appointment for servicing the camera/deck.... Ask them if they have the ability to fix broken CCD pixels either under your service contract, or in fact by using a menu option to ignore the pixel. What ignoring (term depends on the camera/model/age) does it to use adjacent pixel information, along side the anti-twitter field combiner electronics to replace your pixel with something like what you'd expect to be there if it wasn't broken. With the camera in 50i/60i mode, an adjacent field should in fact be biasing the pixel to reduce the effect of interlacing on image quality. Almost all cameras use this technique to reduce the imaging artefacts with a graded loss of vertical resolution.

Hiding the dead pixel is a semi/pro feature - indeed one that is not necessarily known by all "approved service centres". The chances are that the engineer will have had to ask for this special control information specifically from the maker through his support channel.

The plus is that you can save yourself doing this in post, and it kind-of makes your camera more easy to sell when the time comes. Although, especially if asked, you should be honour bound to mention it.

Otherwise there are all manner of ways to remove dead pixels in post. Even some apps have a plug-in specifically designed to do a similar (although realistically a more lossy) equivalent of the on-camera hidden function.

I do hope your camera is one of the types that can overcome this deficiency. CCD blocks and the labour to replace them on portable cameras is probably not an economic option.