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Hello. Russell Cory here for WEWILLKILL. Today we are going to
be covering a great technique for removing Camera Sensor
Dust from video. We will also be covering a little bit about
Adobe's Dynamic Link between Premiere Pro and After Effects.
There is an art to keeping dust off of your camera's sensor.
Often despite your best attempt dust creeps into the camera
and messes up one of your shots.
While shooting *** Audio Guys Say we ran into a Sensor Dust
problem. Since we were were shooting in between projects
and lunch breaks we used whatever camera was laying around
the office. The choice was usually either do the camera
cleaning ritual or set the microphone up & get good sound.
We chose audio every time.
So we ended up with shots like this one where there is a nice
chunk of dust on the sensor directly in the middle of the shot.
As a result we developed a quick technique for dealing with
this problem and ended up using it to solve some other
problems too. Let's export this shot from Premiere Pro to
After Effects.
Right click or Ctrl Click and select - Replace With After Effects
Composition
After Effects will start up and you will find your video clip in it's
own comp. At this point it's a good time to save the After
Effects project. I'm going to save mine into the same folder
structure as the Premiere Pro project.
If you hop back to Premiere Pro you'll find that your video clip
has been replaced in the time line with the dynamically linked
After Effects composition. Any changes you make in the After
Effects comp will be immediately reflected here. You'll also
find the linked comp has been imported into the Project
window. It's a good idea to sort it into a "Comps" bin to keep
things organized. If you right click on the linked comp in the
Premiere Pro timeline and select Edit Original you'll hop
directly into the linked After Effects comp.
Duplicate your footage layer.
Rename the bottom layer
Dust & Scratches.
Rename the top layer Original.
Apply the Dust & Scratches filter to the bottom layer.
Dust & Scratches works by changing dissimilar pixes to be
more
like their neighboring pixels.
The Radius setting sets how far the effect searches for the
dissimilar pixels in the frame. It will quickly make your entire
image very blurry if you turn it up.
The Threshold setting determines how different neighboring
pixels can be from each other.
You'll need to finesse theses settings till you
find
the right balance.
The whole frame is now blurred enough that the dust is gone
but way too blurry to use.
Using the Ellipse tool mask out only the area that have the
dust. And we're done.
You may need to go back and adjust the filter if it's too blurred
or feather the mask 1-2 pixels to help things blend.
We used the same technique to deal with the scratched wall
behind the 2 actors in this shot.
After completing the same 2 layer technique a duplicate of
the ORIGINAL layer is placed at the top of the stack and
renamed Detail.
Using the Pen Tool on the Detail layer we quickly masked back
in the detail that we wanted to maintain.
If you hop back over into Premiere Pro you'll see that your shot
looks great and renders quickly.
Because of Adobe's Dynamic Link once the After Effects
project is created and saved anyone with access
to the file can work on it. So your editor can continue editing
while someone else does the After Effects work. In advanced
workflows multiple After Effects artist can work on
different shots that are all Dynamically Linked back to the same Premiere
Pro project. This parallel real time workflow is a massive
time saver. We hope that this technique for dealing with dust, scratches
and other blemishes will help you in your next project. We
are
always looking for suggestions for improving our tutorials. If
you have a suggestion drop us a line via our contact page.
We'd enjoy hearing from you. This is Russell Cory for
WEWILLKILL.