Remove TV Logo?

Question

Remove TV Logo?

I should start this out by saying that I'm a hobbiest, and a newbie to anything other than fairly basic editing. I am, however, a computer programmer, so I'm certainly not a luddite. I have the latest versions of FCPX and Compressor.

I have some videos that have various kinds of logos in one of the corners, placed there by the TV channels that broadcast them. I'd like to obscur or remove the logos, as best as I can (I don't expect miracles). I know how to blur them, and how to "black-box" them. But it seems to me there's got to be other ways of doing this, especially for the kinds of logos that are just monochrome letters with degrees of transparency.

Can someone point me to some links that can teach me some techniques that might help? I remember reading something about color channels, or chroma, or something like that, but at the time that stuff went over my head. Now I'd like to learn.

The problem is, I don't even know what terms I should be searching for, so I can start learning. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Dan

iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2012), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)

Posted on Feb 9, 2013 7:28 AM

Reply

Answer 1

BenB

Level 6

13,384 points

Feb 9, 2013 10:21 AM in response to Dan Thomas (DAGWare)

All you can do is blur, box, or semi-camoflauge it. You'll need SliceX from CoreMelt to make it easier.

http://www.coremelt.com/products/slicex.html

Reply

Answer 2

Feb 9, 2013 12:23 PM in response to BenB

Ben - SliceX is awesome! It doesn't solve my problem in the way I expected to solve it, but it works darn good. As soon as I started to play with it, I found all sorts of usages for it that I hadn't even thought of. Thank you *so* much for suggesting it. It's going to become indispensible to me very quickly, I can tell.

With that said, and from a much more theroetical viewpoint now that I have something that works pretty well, let me just say that I know there's other ways of doing this. A while back I downloaded a free utility (whose name I can't remember) that could automatically remove logos, and it did a fairly decent job of it. There were some adjustment settings that led me to belive it used some sort of color/chroma/whatever tricks to do what it did. Unfortunately the tool was just too flaky to use with any regular degree of success - I blame that not on the technique it was using to accomplish the task, but rather on a poor job of programming.

So I still believe there's other ways to accomplish this. I may not need them, now that I'm using SliceX, but I still feel like there's something I should learn here. So if anyone else has any thoughts, I'd love to hear them.

In the mean time, back to FCPX to play some more with SliceX!

Dan

Reply

Answer 3

BenB

Level 6

13,384 points

Feb 9, 2013 1:29 PM in response to Dan Thomas (DAGWare)

Try using the "Object Remover" for that TV Logo.

There is no easy way to remove something from a video clip without sophisticated rotoscoping. Basically you have to repaint over it. Object Remover in SliceX does this in a very basic form.

Also, be sure you have legal rights to remove that logo and use those clips.

Reply

Answer 4

Feb 9, 2013 1:55 PM in response to BenB

Yes, I've been using Object Remover. It's a little slow while rendering, though.

As for the rights, I'm just doing this for my own use. Mostly experimenting, learning how to do various things. It's not like I'm going to upload or distribute the results. But thanks for the warning - forewarned is forearmed, or something like that... 😎

Dan

Reply