18 November 2008
Fixing dead pixels
Posted by admin under: Editing; Final Cut Pro .
Last week, I finished cutting a second feature film ” Salud,” see more on their site. One of the issues we had with the footage was there was a dead pixel on most of the scenes shoot early on. It seems the camera had a dead pixel and they didn’t realize this until they saw the dailies.
After we locked picture, I tried to fix this issue. One of the things I did was duplicate the layer and then crop the new video layer down to about 2 x 2 pixels and shift the layer by a pixel or two over, to cover the dead pixel on the layer below. Here are some screen shots to see what I’m talking about.
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Here’s the viewer window with some of the modification to the new duplicate layer. (I took the liberty of increasing the dimensions, so you can see the image better.)
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Here’s the image of the new layer of the footage.
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And finally, here’s what it looks like when the bottom layer is turn on.
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This worked great when the scenes has no movements by the dead pixel but when something crosses it’s path, you can see a flicker from the new layer on the object.
For the shots, where an object/character crossed the dead pixel. I had to buy this great FCP plug-in, Digital Heaven’s Reincarnation to fix the shots ($40.00USD). The plug in worked great with one minor exception. As you can see on the link above, the first thing you do is add an orange pixel on the dead pixel to select it. This is handled by their select tool. I was doing it for a bit, and didn’t see the orange pixels show up on the canvas. It turned out the coordinates where way off, when I zoomed out I noticed the orange pixels about 200-300 pixels off to the left of the area. So with a little trial by error on the X Y coordinates, I was able to place the orange pixels on top of the dead one to fix the footage.
