Good news…a very clever German fella by the name of Jorgen Escher has in the space of just 48 written a final cut plug in that deals with the horrible micro moire pattern that you an see in hair and other fine patterned objects. Martin Beek wrote to me a few days about the problem he was having with test footage for a feature with the 5DmkII being turned down by the producers due to the patterning in the hair. I didn’t have a solution for him but Jorgen took on the challenge and wrote the plug in that solves it. It adds a user defined chroma blur and can also do overall softening which will remove problems parts. If it is just a part of the frame, simply create a mask and use this plug in on just that part.

It works. It doesn’t work on big aliasing problems or things like brick wall moire but it’s pretty damn good and I will be going back over some of my old work and touching it up with this.

So well done Jorgen for the plug in (please donate $10!) and to Martin for providing the inspiration. All this from twitter. You gotta love it! Jorgen on twitter is @colorbyjorg

From Jorgen:

• Usage
  • Double click on a clip on the timeline, go to filters->Marvels DSLR and select DSLR Moire Filter. If you want to fine-tune the filter, you can open the Filter tab of the selected clip and adjust two parameters:
    • Chroma Blur -> move slider until moire disappears
    • Overall softening (standard off) to soften the whole image
    • Softening amount to set the amount of overall softening
• Remarks
  • This plugin does NOT work with AVCHD footage. This will need to be converted to e.g. ProRes or H.264 before usage.
  • This plugin is targeted towards filtering micro-moire issues (red/blue color streaks and pixels that appear in natural and irregular patterns, such as hair, water and grass).  This filter is less effective in removing moire appearing in regular and/or artificial patterns such as brick walls. For the latter, another way of shooting or using a soft filter usually solves the problem.
  • This filter CAN remove almost 100% of micro-moire from irregular structures (e.g. strands of hair) with just using the standard settings. In some cases, depending on the footage and chroma blur amount, a slight desaturation of the red channel can occur. This can simply be amended by using the standard FCP Color corrector filter. Canon 5DMK2 owners that have a camera that came with a bit reddish factory settings (like mine) will even welcome a slight shift to the green… 
  • This is NOT a blur filter. It will not soften your image. It transforms the colorspace to YCbCr and breaks it up into components, further only affecting the “C_B and C_R” channels.

You can download the plug in for free here…but show your appreciation to Jorgen and donate $10! Go on!

Here are two frame grabs from a section of my Convento piece that has nasty moire on the water. First picture is before, second is with the filter applied.