Looking for Help :Video shot with dirty lens

eejackson wrote on 1/15/2005, 3:42 PM
Hi All:

One of our wedding videographers that freelances for us, appearently did not clean his lens prior to shooting some pre-ceremony footage. Whenever I have footage of my groom in his black tux, it looks like there are tiny little droplets all over his tuxedo. It doesn't look too bad in the other footage taken before the ceremony began, but whenever you see the groom or any of the groomsmen, it is very obvious and looks terrible on the black tuxes.

Before I start deleting these shots from my pre-ceremony segment, is there any way I can either eliminate theses droplets or at the very least, make them not so noticable?? I am currently running Vegas 4 and I did try using the cookie cutter, but there is just so many of these tinly little droplets that the end result looked horrible. Are there any paint brush or retouching plugins or software that I can obtain to try and correct this if I can not accomplish this in Vegas?

Thanks,
Lori J

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 1/15/2005, 3:50 PM
Not really. There are plugins for Vdub that might work, and you might try using Photoshop and importing a filmstrip, but that's very tedious work.
Can you use FX to make it more interesting and cover the dirty areas? For instance, use a near black & white filter, with a little added noise for grit to mask the dirt? Some vid problems can be hidden by making them worse, using creative license.
Have you tried the median tool? It likely won't work, but it might help some.
eejackson wrote on 1/15/2005, 3:59 PM
Thank you Spot for your input, I will certainly give your ideas a try !
Much Appreciated,
Lori J.
farss wrote on 1/15/2005, 4:28 PM
Here's a number of other ideas.
Create a track using something that gets rid of the spots, don't worry about destroying the rest of the frame for the moment. Gaussian Blur, Median or even lots of Motion Blur might do it.
Now add another track with no FX and use use cookie cutter or some other masking system to cutout whole affected chunks. Much quicker than trying to do it one spot at a time.
If it's a black Tux then the FX on just that area will be unnoticable.
Perhaps you could even try crushing the blacks, that alone might do the trick (use color curves), without seeing the shots again you might need to mask it to preserve the rest of the frame.
Bob.
riredale wrote on 1/16/2005, 10:45 AM
I think the idea of masking the errors with larger errors is a good one. I'd probably try an old-time filmreel look (with noise and vertical scratches that weave).

If you are serious about getting rid of spots, there are utilities out there that mask tiny defects by borrowing from nearby pixels and averaging. It works very well, but NOT if your camcorder has some sort of image stabilization. That's because in a camera like mine (Sony) the optical stabilization will cause the spots to wander a small amount as the camera tries to stabilize the image.