Water Spot on Lens
 

I shot some video yesterday and when I got home I found out that I had a water spot on my lens. It's small, but very visible. The clip in question is 30 min long.

What are my options for covering up the spot?

depends the effect created by the spot, but you could add an inverted effect that restablish partially a correct picture.

There are some editor plugins that deal with issues like this. Since it's on the lens, its position in the frame will remain constant. That's a bonus because it makes it much easier to mask. The good plugins will use 'nearest neighbor approximation' to more or less reconstruct the image. And keep in mind, you might have to do this in multiple passes to get the right masking achieved.

Since this is a 30 minute clip, I advise making a shorter subclip to test out the cover up before unleashing it on that long piece of video.

-gb-

Here's a suggestion from a user on the Sony Vegas forum when someone had the same problem.

There are several VirtualDub plug-ins that can remove “logos”. Maybe you can use one of these to remove water spots? Two examples are Delogo and Logoaway.

And a warning too.

You're probably gonna have another, more serious issue--if you shot the video on a camcorder with optical or digital stabilization (which virtually all do these days), then those waterspots don't stand still. They move or jiggle around a bit as your camera tries to smooth out your handheld shakes.