Removing date/time from video

mcgeedo wrote on 9/24/2003, 1:02 PM
Hi all,

Like a complete, amateur idiot (hmmm, I guess that's me alright) I recorded an hour of video with the date and time right there on the lower left corner of the frame. White, block letters and really ugly. I would like to try to get rid of it, once the file is clipped down to the few minutes I'll use. I'm looking for suggestions on how best to do it.

I have a de-logo plug-in I got somewhere that I'll try. I'm also thinking of of making a frame grab and making an alpha mask in Photoshop. Then using the mask to cover the lettering with something from the video (a few pixels over, maybe).

None of these ideas sound very good to me. Anybody else ever have to fix that particular mistake?

Thanks in advance,
-Don

Comments

Jsnkc wrote on 9/24/2003, 1:04 PM
There's not really much you can do about it, if you mask it, I'm sure it will still be noticeable. The only other thing I can think of is to crop the picture so that the timestamp is not visible, hopefully the timestamps is small and doesn't take up 1/4th of the screen like most of them do.
josaver wrote on 9/24/2003, 1:08 PM
Shoot the video once again without date ;-)

It's very difficult to remove, I've made it sometimes by croping the video to a letterboxed version. You can also put a new date or a logo or a title, like the city where was shot, with a good font masking the horrible date of the cameras.

Josaver.
mcgeedo wrote on 9/24/2003, 1:22 PM
Josaver: ha, ha, ha... Thank you for your incredibly useful suggestion :-)

If only I could...

Anyway, seriously, I am going to try delogo first. Searching this forum revealed a great commentary by johnmeyer (I think) on the use of it, and if that doesn't work out, then it's letterbox time. I was just hoping against hope that someone had a new, improved idea. The real fix is to put someone talented behind the camera (and that ain't me).
josaver wrote on 9/24/2003, 1:24 PM
Good luck mcgeedo

Josaver.
johnmeyer wrote on 9/24/2003, 1:36 PM
Actually, I hate to disagree with the earlier posters, but you can do a pretty good job of removing it using Delogo. I'm using it right now as we speak. See my earlier post:

Delogo Filter

The result won't be perfect, but you'll be amazed at how good it is.

Hints:

1. Make sure you capture the image as a 720x480 bitmap (you have to set project properties aspect ratio to 1.000, and set the preview window quality to Best).

2. Make sure you use pure red for the mask (in your photo editing program) and do not have any "soft edges" enabled.

3. Make the mask slightly larger than the date/time you are trying to remove. If even one pixel of that old date is unmasked, you'll get a very annoying blotch at the edge of the corrected area.

When the background is totally dark, and if you use this filter correctly, you won't see the date/time information at all. Same is true of a totally white background. On intermediate backgrounds, you are left with what looks like a fuzzy area where the logo used to be, but the "fuzz" has the colors of the adjacent video and therefore is not very noticeable.

Delogo is an amazing filter.
mcgeedo wrote on 9/24/2003, 1:58 PM
Hey John,

I printed out your comments on the old post (8/28/03), and I'm going to use that as my initial direction. I'll let everyone know what my results are.

Thanks all,
-Don