How Would You Fix /Remove This Lense Flare? :)

Soniclight wrote on 9/9/2007, 10:20 PM

Issue

Below is a link to a 12 second excerpt on a clip I'm working on.

I took a clip that was almost monochrome and want to give it a more "Maxfield Parrish" look by bumping up the high end into the yellow.so the sun highlights have a nice contrast. Left half of screen shows unprocessed, right the new look.

It works fine on the clouds themselves, but you'll see that there are a few sun-lense flares at the middle top of the clip in the last part of it. I want ideally remove the flares for they would interfere with the compositing and composition of other material that would be fading in and out.

These flares look fine in the albeit more muted clip even if I were to leave them in. However, you'll see that they obviously got over saturated into the yellows.

I figured I'd ask for advice before diving in. Masks and such are probably the way to go but maybe you have other beneficial ideas.

Please Note:

I set the script to "loop" but it's not working and I couldn't wrap my brains around embedding the player Eugenia here suggested (MS Frontpage issues).

So you'll have to right-click on it (or reload the page) to replay it if your browser doesn't do so.

I've also included a link to a WMV file of it in case someone wants to fool around with. Right-click on the blue clip title and save as per your browser modality. If you don't care for my music, just trash the audio file in Vegas - lol

Comments

DJPadre wrote on 9/9/2007, 10:57 PM

The second split frame is nice colour, but very hot in some clouded area.. try running levels to bring it down

couple of things re flare..

1) Crop (easiest)

2) add 2.35.1 mask

3) Embellish the flare.. with a plugin like trapcode or Velvetmatter.
I assume this is from a Sony HDV camcorder cosnideirng the shape of the flare.. ??

Aside form these 3, i cant think of anything else.. if it was me, i would use the 2.35.1 mask (as i use this on al my high end 16:9 work anyway)

rmack350 wrote on 9/9/2007, 11:27 PM

That covers what I was thinking. The thing here is that if you composite something in it'll probably be over the flare, which gives away the gag. Maybe the solution is to add another flare effect over the existing flares. If you can't beat 'em, Join 'em.

Rob

Soniclight wrote on 9/10/2007, 1:43 AM

Thanks for replies. I may turn down the levels a tad, but it's really the flares that are way too "hot" and so they influence the surrounding area, IMO.

I forgot to mention that cropping out isn't desirable -- I've tried it. Reason:

--- The compositionally richest part of the clip is unfortunately right behind the flares at the top - cropping out the flare area takes the best part of the composition out.

It's already been cropped in an other way:

--- The original ciip was 4:3, I squeezed it vertically to get all the image area to fit as 16:9 (if you removed the letterbox, there nothing there). Nobody would notice if a cloud scene was slightly distorted :)

I suppose I'll just have to play around with gaussian-blurred, feathered mask and some de-saturation and offset tweaks or whatever to make them disappear or un-noticeable in some way.

As to whether it was and HD clip or not, I don't know, I got it as a .mov from Art Beats (it was yesterday's freebie). The excerpt you saw is about the last half of it, slowed down to 0.712 speed.

Soniclight wrote on 9/10/2007, 2:10 AM

Uh, considering today is V-Day (Vegas Pro 8 release day), not expecting much of any more responses to this or other threads for at least a day.

[i]We iz all bizzy havin' a trial.... V-8 :)