Is there a way to erase this white dot through 2 minutes of video?

Question

I recorded a video explaining some complicated things, and when I looked on the big screen, the spotlight is reflecting off my nostril creating a shiny white dot which can be confused with the most worst bogey situation that a human could suffer from, and i was like WHaaaat? Eeewww? It's only a reflection of a spotlight but it looks reeeealy freaky. Is there a way to erase the white dot as it moves through 2 minutes of video?

Answer 1

I don't think it looks that severe, but you'll probably have to do this manually... That's a lot of frames:

1. Duplicate your video layer.
2. Turn off the original video layer and select the new one.
3. Make a small circular mask over the area you want to fix, just slightly larger than the suspicious white area.
4. Set the mask to None, so it doesn't make a hole for now (we will change this later).
5. Enable the Mask Path stop-watch on the mask, so that you can animate the position of the mask frame by frame.
6. Move the mask frame by frame so it always covers the bogey, or whatever was up your nose...
7. Now set the mask to Subtract, so it cuts a hole.
8. Open the Content Aware Fill panel from the Window menu.
9. Click Generate Fill Layer and wait a while.

It will probably work pretty well.. If it doesn't, try adjusting the mask or the alpha expansion - more info here.

If you want to avoid manually moving the mask in every frame:

Instead of step 6, you could try tracking the position of the suspicious white area with a 2D tracker instead, apply that track to a null object, then parent the first frame of your mask to the null instead.

But I suspect a manual move will work better, because the tracker usually needs continuous areas of different contrast.

(Also try coffee instead, it leaves fewer marks)