Possible Post Fix for DUST speck ? ! *

[Multi-Media]

I just finished transferring some footage from my camera to a safety/edit copy on my DV deck. The deck displays on a regular monitor and to my horror, there is a dust speck on all of my .6 Wide Angle footage. I checked the adapter... clean. I checked the lens.. voila a large particle.

I didn't see the speck in the viewfinder and I was doing mostly on the go shooting, so I didn't use a large field monitor.
The fact that the on-camera lens goes to MACRO when the .6 adapter is employed made it focus on the dust speck more closely.

It isn't noticable on my static shots or shots with a lot of detail, but on moving shots with sky or white walls it's unuseable. :'(

My question...
Is there a post method that (like in Photoshop) can replace pixels in a spot with pixels that surround it?

The solution is to make sure you don't have any dust on the lens or bring a field monitor.. I know. I plan to reshoot the unuseable scenes after an almost final cut so I don't have to reshoot everything, but it would be nice if there was a program function that could do it relatively inexpensively.

Thanks

[SirAllen]

You can easily do this in After Effects, and actually probably in most of the higher end NLEs. But I don't know that it'll improve it overall. It'd probably look stranger seeing seeing duplicate pixels than it would to see smeared pixels where the speck was.

One way to do it in your NLE is too make a mask where the speck is, then duplicate your video layer behind it and move the duplicate layer over slightly so it shows through where the speck was. But like I said, it'll probably look worse than the original.

[kai]

... or if you have alot of time on your hands, export your footage as a filmstrip file, and open it up into photoshop (it will be one LOOOONG file). Then, just use the clone brush, and clone out the speck on each frame. That way it will simply clone the surrounding pixels instead of just creating new colored pixels over it. (it will keep the grain, etc). Then, save it out and see how it looks.

Granted you're having to manually retouch each frame, but like you said, your footage is useless if you don't fix it... Just an option, i'm sure there are others, but that's one way of doing it.

Why don't you post a framegrab of your footage with the speck in it, and we'll see what we can do to it to achieve the best result?

[SirAllen]

"or if you have alot of time on your hands, export your footage as a filmstrip file, and open it up into photoshop (it will be one LOOOONG file). Then, just use the clone brush..."

You can do this in After Effects 6, where you would only have to do it for one frame and it'd apply the same clone positions to all frames. This would work fine when the background around the speck is consistent, but when something with detail or contrast passes by it then there's not much you can do except frame by frame editing.

[kai]

Good call... it didn't dawn on me that the speck would be stationary in the frame.

[Multi-Media]

Thanks for getting back..
Yeah, the speck is always in the same spot... I've used cloning extensively to retouch archival photos in PAINTER.
The idea of the mask with the shifted video seems like the most expeditious way to do it... I guess I was thinking of those "out of focus" faces and logos that need to be eliminated from "reality" footage.
Thanks again... I'll try to post a frame grab so you can see what I'm faced with.