View Full Version : Making corrections to text in a completed Quicktime file?


Nigel Barker
May 25th, 2009, 12:21 PM
I have been asked to take a finished QuickTime video file of about one minute in length & make some corrections to it (change an email address & remove a single word from a title).

Ignoring the fact that I don't yet have the answer to my question "What the hell happened to the FCP project, the audio & video files used to produce this video & the person who created it" does anyone have any ideas of the quickest & simplest way to perform this task?

I can think of several different approaches to both these tasks but have never actually needed to do something like this so would welcome suggestions before I head off down the route of painstakingly editing each frame in Photoshop or some other tedious time-consuming process when there is a free plug-in that can do just what I want.

Cheers

Nigel

Gary Nattrass
May 25th, 2009, 12:38 PM
Would it be possible just to add a block caption over the existing text? something like this:
http://www.abc.net.au/reception/images/interference/closed_captions.jpg

Not the prettiest soloution but saves you having to re-do lots of frames.

Nigel Barker
May 26th, 2009, 01:24 AM
Gary, thanks for the suggestion. Something like that may well work. I need to find out what is acceptable for the client. As the alternative is re-doing the whole project a quick & dirty alternative may be OK

The CHV Clone & Paint Plug-in (http://www.chv-plugins.com/cms/Fx-Script/CloneAndPaint-collection/CloneAndPaint-collection.php) looks like just the job for erasing a word which is on a plain background.

Gary Nattrass
May 26th, 2009, 01:31 AM
You could also make the block more integrated to the video like they do on the news straps:http://www.mikesacks.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/tv024_heather_sweet.jpg

Nigel Barker
May 27th, 2009, 12:20 AM
This turned out to be quicker & easier than I thought. The CHV Clone plug-in made it so easy to just paint over what needed to be changed & then I just added a text caption on top. The original video had been created in FCP using the default fonts etc. so the new text matched without a problem. I was lucky in that what needed to be replaced was on a solid coloured background.

The client was pleased with the 'invisible mending' & delighted not to have to re-do the whole clip. It was apparently created a couple of years ago & they had genuinely lost the project source files after a hard disk crash!