So I’m working a project at work that requires me to show website material on top of the people on camera.  Well, after several failures with screencap programs (the text was far too small), I decided just to shoot the screen with my camera.

The problem came when I needed to put it in to the timeline.  The shots came with a bunch of lines on them.  This is, of course, the thin-film transitor layer that forms the pixels on the monitor.  Our eyes don’t usually see it (except on poorly manufactured monitors), but the camera picks right up on it.  This is a problem.  While this may not be the ideal solution, I have came up with a workaround if you run into the problem if you’re using Adobe Premiere.

Simply go to your Effects panel and choose the “Fast Blur” effect from Video Effects -> Blur and Sharpen.  Apply it to your monitor shot, and slightly notch up the blur.  You should only need to set it at 1.00 or 2.00.  Any more and the text starts to visibly become blurred.  It doesn’t remove the lines, but at the low numbers, it will blur the picture just enough to smooth them out to make them not as noticable.

A better solution may be try and reshoot the picture and adjust the settings on your camera.  When asking at Creative Cow for a better way to fix this problem, user William suggested adjusting the shutter speed.  This didn’t work for me, but my camera is not always…ideal…for everything.  Maybe some of the higher end camera would benefit from this.

So, for now, the slight blur seems to work.  I can see why this wouldn’t be wanted, though, especially if you’re going to output in HD, as the blur will be more visible.  However, I’m currently outputting at SD, so the blur isn’t as much of an issue.