Dust on lens cover ruined some images with sky background

[William Boehm]

I am new to learning vegas 9.e pro...and in using neoscene 5.04. is there a filter, or some method to remove dust and rain drops that show up in video of mountains and sky that were marked on the lens filter? i can of course clone out in photoshop cs3 in stills, but how do you do this in video. only about 15 shots out of a hundred that the lighting brought out the raindrops or dust on the lens cover of the camera. the footage involves up to 5 seconds each. thanks in advance. bill

[Don Bloom]

take the footage that has the dust/raindrops make that portion an image sequence save those to a seperate folder, there will be a lot of them, bring those images to photoshop do your thing to them save back as the png images and then import the image sequence back to the timeline. It'll take some time to do but it works. Set the time for the import back to .001 (I think...my edit machine is shut down right now so I can't say for sure but you obviously want the sequence to come on at the frame rate you shot it at (.001 for 30 frames per second) and when you play it, it'll look like you never touched it.

Again I don't remember off the top of my head if the time is .001 or........so you might need to play with it a little.

[William Boehm]

thanks don ..but need some clarification. i have CS3 extneded photoshop. so i take the clip, import it into photoshop, or take snapshots? then clone one or the whole sequence, which would be hugely time consuming? i have never imported anything other than snapshots from clips in png files...single frames. can cloning the spots out for one clip be applied to the whole clip? bill

[Don Bloom]

I've never worked with that version of photoshop I use an older version so I can't do vid clips in it. Instead of taking snapshots find the area you want to repair, split it on both ends, and render it to an image sequence. Thats not in the render as menu it's in tools. For a 10 second clip it's give you as many images as you set the timeing for. I set to .01 so I get 1 image per frame. IOW, for 10secinds of video I'll get 300 frames. I then import those frames into PS, work it, save as, and back in Vegas I import the image sequence to fill the original hole.
It is a PITA and time consuming but there are times we just don't have a choice I guess.

I just thought about this also. Something you could try. Duplicate that area of the clip, put it up on another track above the original, move it over to the left or right 1 frame so the dust or rain area is covered by footage without dust or rain and lower the opacity of the top track to say 30% or so. You might need it to be slightly higher but that might work. Maybe.

[William Boehm]

don..i shot 60i interlaced with hdv and a canon xha1. by splitting the i assume you mean take the part of the clip to be repaired..which in my case the entirity of the 10 clips..each clip about 4-6 second long scenics. should i deinterlace? well i will give this a try tonight. thanks again. bill

[Edward Troxel]

Don, in 9.0e it IS under File - Render As - Image Sequence. Vegas Pro 9 does it as a render-as option instead of using a script for that task. It also gives more file type options to save as instead of just JPG and PNG.

[Don Bloom]

Edward, I didn't know that. Thanks for the update. I guess one day I'll need to upgrade but since I'm still shooting SD and version 6 [I know:-( ] still works for me, I guess I'll just keep sluggin' along with that.

[William Boehm]

ed...thanks for the comment...can you answer then my last comment about deinterlaced? do i need to change that..again i am one week old now playing with vegas. bill

[Edward Troxel]

Since the clips are so short, I'd try it both ways and see which way you like best.