I have a blood spot on my lens

[selftaught]

That's right, I was so careless on the last day of the shoot that I didn't notice a giant blood spot on the lens. I shot two scenes with it on there, and it looks terrible. I don't know much about AE and special fx, but I did try to export the clips wth the spot as a filmstrip and opened it in photoshop to try to clone stamp it out. It didn't work too well, as you could see the outline of the clone stamp trying to cover up the spot. It's also a moving shot for most of both scenes, and it's really hard to stamp out when it's over someone's face. I know, amateur - I guess I was just too excited to end the 9 month shoot. Can anyone help?

 

[SeanEmer]

how big is the spot, and what camera movement takes place under it? some screenshots would be helpful.

 

[Glen Gustafson]

shake reveal

shake reveal

I don't know if Aftereffects can do this, but in Shake I've loaded a sequence of frames with a background layer of the sequence offset by one frame (whichever direction looks best) and done a "reveal" to let the clean area of the background frame show through where the spot is.

Doing a fix one frame at a time in Photoshop will result in a chatter that draws attention. The reason the reveal works better is that the backgound frame has motion and color changes only a frame away from the forground image.

Great for getting rid of people or airplanes in time-lapse footage or a hair in the gate (not much of a problem these days, heh heh).