Removing Sensor Dust Spots

[justashhhley]

Hi there!

I have been attempting to remove some sensor dust spots from my videos in post using this method I found online from Matt Johnson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=fb0HkvN9nE0&feature=emb_logo

I've followed the instructions word by word multiple times and instead of applying the dust & scratches effect to only my selected masks, it's applying it to the entire clip - making it blurry like a watercolor painting.

Hoping for some assistance as this is for a wedding video! Thank you!

[Roland Kahlenberg]

Provide screen grabs of your Comp and Timeline panels. Ensure all related properties are revealed in the Timeline, in your screen grab.

[justashhhley]

Sorry about that! Adding them now.

[Roland Kahlenberg]

It looks like you have ONE Mask which is encompassing the entire Comp area and it is this mask that is forcing the effect to be applied to the entire Comp area. I suggest you disable the bottom/clean plate/layer while you are looking for this Mask.

[Rick Gerard]

That is only a fair tutorial that uses kind of a sledgehammer workflow to remove sensor dust. If you can post a frame from the video that we can see maybe we can suggest a better workflow. If your masks are not working then you have either applied the effect to the wrong layer, the masks are set to the wrong mode or the Compositing options (very useful for this kind of work) are improperly set. We need to see a screenshot with the modified properties of the layer giving you problems revealed. Select the layer, press uu, take a screenshot and post it to this forum so we can see what you are doing.

Personally, I would start by trimming the shot in AE to the frames you'll actually use (probably would not use Dynamic Link in PPro if the shot is more than a few seconds and it renders in a couple of seconds a frame max). Then I would duplicate the footage layer, solo the top copy, draw masks around every dust spot you need to fix using the pen tool, then start with something as simple as Gaussian Blur. The most efficient technique depends entirely on the footage.

[justashhhley]

Thank you so much for taking the time to respond! I've attached a screenshot of a clip of the original footage as what you requested of my masks - there are 19 total but couldn't fit all in the frame. They all have the same settings.

[Roland Kahlenberg]

Have you double checked each mask to ensure not a single one is covering the entire comp area?

[Rick Gerard]

Your masks are far too big and they should be the same shape as the dust spots. You are trying to correct too much with a single layer. I took one of your screenshots and set up a comp, duplicated the footage, carefully drew 5 masks, changed the blend mode to Screen to lighten the areas I masked, then individually adjusted the mask settings for each mask to hide the spots. Here's how the comp was set up:

For reference this is the before:

This is after:

That is a huge improvement and it took about five or six minutes. You'll go crazy trying to remove all of the flaws in the image, and if the camera moves around a lot you may need to animate the opacity of the individual masks. About five or six masks per copy are all that should be required. If there are some especially troublesome spots you may have to use some other color correction or even cloning tools to get the job done, but trying to do the whole thing with one copy of the footage is not going to work because the flaws have a lot of different properties. 

If I actually saw the shot I could give you a much better idea of how to hide these flaws. 

Another option is to go for a heavily stylized look to the project so that only a few of the darkest spots need to be fixed. If this problem is on most of the footage you are going to have to decide what is going to be acceptable because it could take several weeks to clean up a 30-minute video filled with sensor dust.

And the reason that the effect is covering the entire layer is right there in the third screenshot in your first post. There is a yellow mask around the entire layer. You can clearly see it on the left edge of the screen. This could have easily happened by accidentally double-clicking the mask tool. Scroll down and click on yellow masks until the layer sized mask has been selected and then delete it or turn it off.