When it comes to helpful technical hints, I tend to be more of a taker than a giver. But after a recent quick fix to what seemed like a HUGE problem, I decided to give back with a quick summary of my hot pixel life saver.
After a long shoot, I noticed a bright red, unmoving dot on a lot of my 5D Mark II footage. Turns out this is called a hot pixel, dead pixel, or stuck pixel. It can appear in different colors and sizes, sometimes happens when the sensor heats up, and there are indeed ways to fix it.
You can send your camera in to Canon for a repair. Or you can try the DIY route and do a manual sensor cleaning (here’s a how to by some guys I don’t know):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=WJBuGhMnvFo
I was paranoid, so I did both.
After I got the sucker fixed, I needed to figure out how to deal with the footage I had that had this stubborn red dot. I found a couple different Final Cut Pro plugin options, and narrowed it down to these two: http://www.chv-plugins.com/cms/Fx-Script/Repair-collection/Repair-collection.php and http://www.digital-heaven.co.uk/dh_reincarnation
The free trial on the Digital Heaven Reincarnation sold me. Plus, if heaven forbid you should have two hot pixels in the same frame, this plugin lets you take care of them both. So I downloaded a free trial, which lets you do the quick FCP install and try it on your footage. It leaves a watermark, so you do have to buy the plugin to actually use it. You also can’t go back and apply the purchased plugin to the clips you changed with the trial, so don’t change it on all the clips or you’ll just have to go back and do them all again. Once you purchase the plugin you can fix the hot pixel on one clip and then copy and paste attributes (then you’ll have to do a lot of rendering, but that’s how it goes).
Here’s a quick look at the before and after of my footage (blown up to 400% in Final Cut Pro so you can see the sucker).
I thought the whole thing was going to be a huge pain in the neck, but actually once I decided to go with the plugin, it was ridiculously easy.
Phew. That felt like an infomercial. But seriously, seriously a life saver.
– Catherine