Hi there

Here's another one from me.

Anyone know how if it's possible to get rid of raindrops on the lens which has now been captured on tape.

I could'nt see on the day of the shoot when it was pi$$ing down.

If it's possible how can it be done?

Thanks
Wayne

I've had to do a similar thing but with underwater video and small air bubbles on the lens. (Sort of the exact opposite in a way!)

How do you it really depends on the tools you have available. If you have an NLE that can manipulate small regions of a frame, you will have an easier job than with something like Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5. I had to export a frame (using Media Player of all things), open it in PaintShop Pro (since I'm cheap), isolated the offending bubble, convert the whole frame to a grey scale mask and then reimport that into Premiere. Once back, I used it as a track matte, coupled with a second copy of the original video set at a different brightness/contrast so as to make the bubble disappear.

If you have large drops, it could get more tricky since they could act as their own lenses and create quite a bit of distortion. In that case, you may need to find a filter that could reverse the lensing action. IMHO, if you can hide the edges of the drops, you've achieved 80% of the goal.

How many seconds have the raindrops in? Do you shoot in 25p?

I was shooting a Wedding in East Sussex on the 30th and it was pouring down, I bought an extra large lens cloth in the morning and it came in very handy.

Removal: Photoshop CS3 Extended works very well for this, but it takes time, frame by frame. Just a few seconds takes a while. It's easier to clone if you have a locked off shot, you can do an action script, etc.. to speed things up a bit.

I did have a few appearing in the shots but I kind of liked the look, so they stayed in.

Good luck, James