If you can Cookie Cut or Bezier mask and a GOOD area adjacent to the pixels and MOVE it to the position of the bad area, you can do this.

If you want to email me the frame I'll set up a VPro8 veg and send it back to you. Interested?

Grazie

This is one of those situations where you have to wonder whether the effort involved is worth the fix.

Who's the audience for this project? The producer will obsess about the "slight jump" but the viewer won't likely notice it, since it will be gone in 1/30 second.

I came across an article recently about something called the "Futz Factor". It was about the loss of productivity in the U.S., due to people futzing with fonts, colors, etc, for hours and hours, and coming to a result that, all things considered is really no different than.

I had an experience recently doing a title sequence that took almost a day to do. When I showed it to my wife, asking her opinion, she said "That's nice." I said "That's nice?!!! . . . It took me a whole day to do!

As producers, we obsess over every frame, when not _every_ frame requires it. Especially if we can't bill it!

That said, how trimming the offending frame, and doing a short dissolve? Have an uninvolved party look at it, and see what they think?

Goji

This is one of those situations where you have to wonder whether the effort involved is worth the fix.

Who's the audience for this project? The producer will obsess about the "slight jump" but the viewer won't likely notice it, since it will be gone in 1/30 second.

I came across an article recently about something called the "Futz Factor". It was about the loss of productivity in the U.S., due to people futzing with fonts, colors, etc, for hours and hours, and coming to a result that, all things considered is really no different than.

I had an experience recently doing a title sequence that took almost a day to do. When I showed it to my wife, asking her opinion, she said "That's nice." I said "That's nice?!!! . . . It took me a whole day to do!

As producers, we obsess over every frame, when not _every_ frame requires it. Especially if we can't bill it!

That said, how trimming the offending frame, and doing a short dissolve? Have an uninvolved party look at it, and see what they think?

Goji

Perhaps you could use a cutaway on that place, but is all depends on the footage etc. of course.

/Ulf

Well, I did 'futz' with it for about an hour (imported the frame into Photoshop, fixed the artifacts, and reinserted into the timeline)... it looked horrible. So, I decided to delete the frame... it looked horrible because there are people walking in the shot and they distinctly jumped forward. So, I then decided to try a dissolve... that didn't work either.

Finally, I decided to leave it as is and try not to lose any sleep over it. So far, it's been pretty hard to let it go. Not necessarily because of the less than perfect product... but more so because it happened in another place or two in the footage. Now, I'm obsessed if there is something wrong with my camera or heads.

How do I attached a screen shot so you all can see what I'm talking about? Please advise.

Thanks, Grazie, for the offer... but you are light years ahead of me... but I'll keep your offer in my back pocket. ;-)

Don't forget that you're your own worst critic. And what looks to you like it's shouting from the screen "hey, look at me!" will probably go unnoticed by the average viewer.

You said "people walking," was the camera stationary?

If not, you could do what I did for a beautiful shot of dancers where the pan head broke in the middle of the pan, causing the camera to jump.

I just inserted a brief standard Vegas lens flare when the camera jumped.

Even looking at the footage post-post myself, I can't see the jump :O).

The sudden flare pulls the eye away at just the right time, and afterwards the eye reorients itself to the ongoing situation on the screen.

Coursedesign... back in the good ole' days, during the final client review process, we used to drop a book behind the client's head 'by accident' to make them turn around just before a questionable shot... it distracted them for a second and they went on to approve the project (hey, we've all done stuff like this to some degree). Your lens flare idea is a high-tech way of doing this (and I've used it successfully to avoid jumpcuts!)

This 'distraction' tactic also works great when I'm watching movies with my young kids and a questionable scene comes on..."Who wants popcorn?!?!?"

Hoo-hoo-hoo!

I missed your last response here with the popcorn, that is just precious!

As for the original artifact problem, if you haven't gone too far in working one-frame-at-a-time in Photoshop for a month already, see if you can befriend somebody with Final Cut Pro or Final Cut Pro Express, and worst case buy them the $49 plugin reviewed here:

http://www.lafcpug.org/reviews/review_chv_clone_plugin.html

It does what the Clone tool does in Photoshop, only it does it better in several ways.

Everything is GPU accelerated so it is snappy, and it looks nice enough that I'm picking one up for myself. I'm even considering the X-MAX bundle of all their products, available for half off at Toolfarm through Dec. 31.

Unless I've missed something you can do that cloning in Vegas, just use Beziers and track motion. Heck, give me an hour and I could probably do it FCP and I've never used FCP. With AE Pro you could do way fancier tricks combining that with trackers which this plug doesn't have.

Getting back to the core issue.
CVM, have you tried to get a capture without the dropouts?
Short of a major head clog during recording we can usually get rid of these problem by one of several techniques.

1) Try a better VCR, preferably a more expensive unit. At times it's required a DSR 2000 but start with something more affordable first. The DSR 45 is usually enough.

2) Try a capture form the analog outputs of the VCR. Say DSR-11 S-Video -> ADVC 300->PC. This usually gets rid of the problems.

If all else fails or you need to fix something in a hurry one trick I've done a few times over the years is to cutout the offending frame leaving the audio track alone, move along the T/L say 1 second and cut the vision again. Go back to your gap and ctl+drag the end of the track two frames to fill in the missing frame and create a 1 frame dissolve. Sure looking at it frame by frame you can see what's going on but at normal speed you'll not notice it. You might need to make the period that you time stretch longer, depending on taste and what's happening in the shot.

Bob.

All great ideas, guys... You know, maybe I should recapture to see if it's on the tape or if it was in playback. Perhaps the compensator missed it the first time.

But I'm intrigued with the software solutions... I have very little experience using Bezier's... so I wouldn't even have an idea how that would work.

Thanks!

Make Beziers your friend. How they work in Vegas can become a bit mind numbing but they get the job done. They're a very common tool in most NLEs and Photoshop. I probably finally came to grips with them more so in PS than Vegas initially but now use them in both.

If they seem a bit too much to learn Vegas also has a very basic tool that's a lot easier to come to grips with, the Cookie Cutter. Only very basic shapes but that might be all you need.

Make duplicate of track. Mute bottom track. Apply Cookie Cutter to upper track to cut out the bit you want. Use Track Motion to move it elsewhere in the frame. UnMute bottom track, job done.

You can turn down the opacity of either track to make it easier at times to see what you're doing. That's the slider in the track header. Remember to set it back to 100% though.

Always keep in mind that every NLE is non destructive. Save a copy of where you're at and just rip into something to try out new things, no harm done. If you make a mess go back to saved project. I know that sounds bleeding obvious but I've lost count of how many times I've forgotten that in the small hours of the morning fretting over something.

Bob.