fixing a lens flare? How?

musman wrote on 6/12/2004, 1:59 PM
Just got back the footage from my first short shot on film (super 16mm). Things look pretty good except for a shot that has a pretty bad lens flare (looks like 3 or 4 red glowing disks on the actor's shoulder).
The only possibility I knew of to fix this would was in photoshop, but I've never done anything like that before. A friend mentioned this would be a good rotoscoping project and asked if Vegas could do this. I only have Vegas 4, so I'm wondering if this something Vegas 5 or Wax could do. Does anyone know?
If it helps, here is a link to a pic of the lens flare:
http://www.dtbdfilms.com/page7.html
Thanks for any help!

Comments

BillyBoy wrote on 6/12/2004, 4:19 PM
That's a job for Color Corrector Secondary. If its only a few seconds I would edit it out. Since his shirt is so dark another approach would be to use the cookie cutter and mask it out that way on a overlay track.
musman wrote on 6/12/2004, 10:49 PM
I appreciate the help. Unfortunately, the shot is a static one on a tripod, so the flare is there the whole time and there's no way to edit around it.
I've tried messing with the secondary color corrector but I don't think it's going to work here. Maybe I just don't know how to use it well enough. If I could just replace only the amber circle with what amounts to the light grey of the actor's shirt I'd be set. But I can't seem to do this.
Any more advice on this or a way to rotoscope the flare away? Thanks again!
BillyBoy wrote on 6/13/2004, 6:59 AM
I made a screen capture and played with it a little. It seems the easier way is to use the cookie cutter.

To totally get rid of the area on his right shoulder:

1. Duplicate the track, drop the cookie cutter on the top track.
2. Set so a circle, method cut away.
3. Use the cookie-cutter eyedropper to sample his shirt. Not the flaw, a area close to it to pick up the shirt color.
4. To start set size and border to a large number so its about 1/4 size his face so you can see it as you move it.
5. Move into position and shrink down both the border and size. I ended up with .16 for border and .018 for size.

You may want to adjust the feather a little and also click on the color patch right above the eye dropper tool in the cookie cutter filter to change color space to HSL, so you can also adjust the alpha channel. Add keyframes to track when he moves. Repeat for the other flaws.

Once you see how it works, make all the other adjustments you're going to first, as far as colo correction, do the cookie cutter last otherwise the flaws will show up again.

beerandchips wrote on 6/13/2004, 8:14 AM
I'd fire the cameraman for not using the viewfinder or checking the footage before teardown.