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Best way to remove a watermark from video I now own?

Turnpike

Turnpike

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 2, 2011
582
323
New York City!
I bought a library of clips (the whole very small company) and of all the stuff that came with it, there are some older videos that would work wonderfully as inserts into our current promo material or advertisements. The problem is, the only videos of this footage that are still in existence have watermarks on them with the old company's name.

To be clear, I now OWN the video. The watermark is just a previous company name. The video wouldn't be useful to anyone else anyway, but for some reason the watermark is on all 3 copies we have.

I saw online that there are apps and ways to remove watermarks, but I want to maintain the quality of the video as close to humanly possible.

Also, I don't care what it costs. I see there are 402,038 ways to do it "for free" online, and I have no problem paying $30 for an app that's known to completely solve my problem in the best way. Or any other software. Also, I already own Final Cut Pro X in case that can do it (but I didn't find anything online saying it could).

Does anyone know of any app or software that works on a Mac that can remove a watermark completely? If there's a clear winner in the category, how well does it work, and what can you see/tell afterwards in the area it was? Again, I don't care about cost, only the result.

The video is very short, less than 3 minutes, it's just a little video of an older building, the production area, and some aerial footage of the building. So less than 3 minutes and a small file if that matters.

Thanks so much for your help.
 
How big is the watermark? There are $30 photo apps that do an amazing job removing unwanted objects from photos. For video usually you have to resort to masks, Basically you create a mask of the water mark and substitute/overlay something not noticeable or blur. The watermark is typically stable from frame to frame, at least you have that going for you.

Otherwise its a frame by frame photo editing type thing. If its something you just want to blur, not remove, thats a lot easier.
 
Thanks! I definitely want to remove it, not blur it.... even if I end up having to crop it out. I see there are "free" versions of software that does this, but I never liked playing malware roulette by downloading them, I'd rather buy a proven program and just have it in the future, and do the best job possible on what I'm working on.
 
Adobe After Effects just recently got an update with content aware fill that does an incredible job.
 
DaVinci Resolve has something that may work. The Fusion tab/page. There is a free version. It's bit of a learning curve.

In my experience, how easy this is to do, and how well this works, depends on what happens behind the watermark in the main footage. If it's relatively static, than np. But if there are pans and zoomed and scenery/color changes, it will be much harder. Watermarks are not "an element" that can be removed from rendered media. It's just pixels smooshed in there with everything else.

Have you considered dropping an overlay on top of the watermark?
 
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