My cousin recently sent me video of my Great-Grandfather with me on his lap, taken in 1982 - something I didn't think existed.

Problem: The video was originally shot on film and then transferred to DVD in the late 1990's. The shop that did the transfer produced good quality results, but for some inexplicable reason included text reading "Transfer by Video Plus - 1010 Main Street, Paterson NJ" on the top center of the video image lasting for 10 seconds, disappearing and reappearing every 10 seconds thereafter. Their advertising absolutely ruins the video.

I'm wondering if there is a way to cover it with a grey bar or blur the element on screen when it appears? I can isolate the areas of text between Razor Tool edit points, and it should be possible to add a masking element between those points; but I don't know where to begin. I've looked online and only found primers on how to blur the entire clip segment, not just a small area of the clip.

I don't want to crop the picture to remove the advertisement as it would cut away too much of the video.

Any ideas?

Easy way: Spot Remover (Effect) or Obscure (Effect), draw the box and your good.

Medium way: Duplicate the clip
Clip V1 = Nothing
Clip V2 = add an Alpha Shape -> Draw a rectangle -> add the Gaussian Blur effect and be happy
The newest versions of kdenlive you don't need to duplicate the clip, just use: Alpha Shapes -> Gaussian Blur -> Mask Apply

Hard way: extract a frame from the clip and bring to Gimp, remove the text using Clone Tool bring back to kdenlive and use the motion track to match the movement of the camera to this new still image.
Yeah I know it's very hard and probably unnecessary.

BUT!!!

HARDEST: Go back to 80's and record everything again.

Hope it helps, love u

[quote="Makinars-Studio"]o) Easy way: Spot Remover (Effect) or Obscure (Effect), draw the box and your good.

Thanks for your help - I truly appreciate it.

if the film is made with static positions of the camera (and the watermark has a solid color background that ruins the obscure final effect) you can extract a frame to project (the first before the watermark) add it for the lenght of the watermark and with crop/scale/tilt replace the watermark with a static component taken from the video... after this you have just to extract a frame every 10 seconds and copy the effect on the newly created frame.

2nd method ... if the watermark is just a white/black text in the same position you can also create (using a image editing software) a transparent PNG with the same text and replace the text at any occurrence changing the color to dominant color of the scene (brown scene brown color.... black scene... black color) after that you can use BLUrs effects to mix the text with the scene.
(on kdenlive the blur need to be placed on MASTER effect stack and with keyframes can be added on specific locations)

3d method... the first method can be used also without solid background color of the watermark.. you can create a purple text to overwrite the original one and using alpha masking on master effect create an hole on the clip to see a copy of the same clip just shifted by the size of the watermaker.

Other options mentioned here already. Blur, blocks, etcetera.
Some more options...

- You could make a gif or png with a beam over that and the rest of the image transparant.

- Even could create a banner like that, but then with your own text in it? "My Great-Grandfather in 1982" or something like that.

- Could create a banner like that, with some captive from the original film to fit in (perhaps some seconds later in that movie?). Perhaps won't fit perfect, but cloaks the original film view enough to not get an annoying big beam or blur in it.

- And if your lucky you have simular footage which fits exactly in there. Then overlay that footage with crop just enough for that text.

- Only 10 seconds? You could zoom from start (until text out of the screen) to zoom out for say about 20 seconds?
And at the end start zooming in for the latest 20 seconds so that the text gets out of screen.

But at the end. Real representive text can not be removed. Will remain some kind of trace.