How to Remove Watermarks Water Marks....

[snommas]

So, I've been trying to remove several different watermarks from a few videos with poor results. I need your help. I have used this tutorial but the outcome was horrible. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne2kAqrB4Tg

Anyway, here are screen shots of four different videos with different types of watermarks.







Here are the links to short pieces of the videos. Some have a clean plate. Let me know if I need to upload better footage.

http://s873.photobucket.com/albums/ab292/snommas/?action=view&current=Sequence01-1.mp4

http://s873.photobucket.com/albums/ab292/snommas/?action=view&current=Sequence03-1.mp4

http://s873.photobucket.com/albums/ab292/snommas/?action=view&current=Sequence04.mp4

I've been using After Effects but would use any software to make this look good.

This is for my own personal use, just what to play these without the watermarks.

Thank you in advance for your help!

[hech54]

Is this a joke?

[intracube]

Because the videos are such poor quality (loads of compression artefacts), you're not going to get any kind of seamless result without a lot of work.

The main steps are:
- make a still image from part of the video where the watermark is on a black background
- clean up in photoshop/GIMP, increase the contrast so the lettering is white and the background is completely black:

If there aren't any frames where the text is on a clean bg, you'd need to recreate the overlayed text/logo by hand. Accuracy is important here.

In AfterEffects or similar, take a copy of the original video and set it to a layer above the original. Use the cleaned up image to control the alpha and create a mask.

Use the curves colour correction tool to reduce the black level back of the upper layer (not the mask) by dragging the bottom left point to the right. A straight line should be maintained:


Which will give you something like this:


Sometimes there are other refinements that can be done such as blurring the mask image slightly (2px radius) and then tweaking the contrast/brightness to shrink/expand the mask slightly. Also using other masks to selectively blur what's left of the text outline - but with source video like this there would be very little to gain from these extra steps.

[budwzr]

Nice work!

I think somebody around here was claiming to reverse partial transparencies with VirtDub filters.