Removing lens flare?

I just shot footage with a DVX/M2 adapter, and one shot came out with some undesirable lens flare at the top of the frame. I was wondering if FCP had any tools to minimize or get rid of it all together. I know there's the "lens flare" effect where you can add a flare to a shot, but I'd like to remove flare, and that seems to be all I can find on the subject. I don't know if it's possible, but thanks for any advice!

Sorry mate, as far as I know you're out of luck

Some options: Rotoscoping, background replacement, traveling mattes, selective color correction, frame by frame Photoshopping...

No magic answer. I would have to see the footage to troubleshoot & diagnose. You will probably not be able to handle this in FCP, mate. This is a job for After Effects. How much lens flare are we talking about anyway? Few flashes / frames / or minutes? Is this a locked down camera?

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

This reply may be a few years too late, but for anyone out there who has footage shot unwittingly with lens flare... here's the solution.

This can all be done in FCP without any motion tracking. The shot can be a pan, a tilt, or anything else, but not a zoom. Also, the flare should be reasonably stationary on the lens. The shot activity behind the lens flare makes the flare noticeable.

Here's how it works:

For each flare that you want to get rid of, copy and paste duplicates of your footage in the layers above. Bring Effects/Video Filters/Matte/Eight-Point Garbage Matte and Effects/Video/Filters/Image Control/Brightness into each duplicate. Activate one of the duplicates in the Viewer and size up the Canvas to 400 or so, so that you can see the flare well.

Use the Eight-Point Garbage Matte to encircle the flare. I shoved the Smooth up to 95, the Choke was set to -8 and the feather to 94 (you may wish to tinker with this). Make sure invert is not ticked on.

Set the Brightness filter a few stops down to slightly darken up the encircled flare.

You will notice that the flare starts to disappear in the Canvas image.

That's it -- that's all. Because the flare is stationary on the lens, no tracking is necessary throughout any of the following frames.

If the flare moves across the lens, you will have to use motion and keyframes to move with it. If the flare is not white like mine was, try the using the 3 way Color Corrector instead of the Brightness to set the tone and color of the overlay.

Hope this helps.

iSpot Media.

Quote
iSpot
Set the Brightness filter a few stops down to slightly darken up the encircled flare.

Lens flare looks like brightening but it's really the addition of (usually) white light. To undo an addition requires a subtraction, rather than a toning down (which is a multiplication).

Flare's most obvious effects are on the darkest tones. Those effects are perfectly curable. But where flare lifts lightest tones over video max levels the loss is permanent. The "addition cure" is complicated by the video's having gamma precorrection. You can apply FCP's gamma filter at 2.2 to the flared material. Then subtract grey slug. Then apply FCP's gamma filter at 0.45. This will restore the flared image except where it ran over video max. Those tones will now be less than white. To fix what isn't there will require artistic fudging, such as with the contrast and brightness filters.

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany