So I have a bunch of shots where I need to remove a pesky small lens flare - like a floating dot. Sadly it goes over multiple moving people, and there is a ton of lighting changes. This seems like something that the old Rig removal spark could get me 75% of the way there, but now how are we doing these?
Making a million patches while matching lighting seems too cumbersome in the age of AI. Spam me with your best ideas please!
We have to do this quite a lot. Tbh I normally give it to our AfterEffects team and their first go-to is Content Aware Fill, using multiple cleaned reference frames. Depends very much on content/action though, and has special issues on underwater footage. I believe the Mocha Remove Module is sometimes another option, as it has automatic lighting adjustments.
Sorry not to offer a Flame solution! 
Good use case for Silhouette Paint (also not Flame solution, though can run as an OFX node inside Batch).
Presumably the content underneath lensflare is available in neighboring frames. Si Paint allows you to apply a color correct (exposure, gamma, sat, etc.) to each paint stroke, as well as a transform and blur. And you don’t need to make patches, you can just modify source frame on the fly.
So frame by frame:
Rinse/repeat. Sounds slow, but once you have it down and the right keyboard shortcuts you can fly through it, and it will be nice high quality.
If luck is with you, and the offset and movement is pretty consistent, you could track the spot and auto-paint it in, then go back and fix shots that are off.
Clone brush parameters…
Color Grade applied to brush strokes…
I had something fairly similar and also hairy. I ended up getting a matte of the small flare caustic and using iterative pixel spread stretch contract. It did the job for me, but maybe or maybe not for your shot.
The Age of AI is upon content creators, not the high end of visual effects artists yet. Can you post an example? 99.9% sure that this will be a kitchen sink approach…a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and a whole lotta manual work.
Agreed. If any ML based approach has a chance on something like this, it would be CopyCat over in Nuke. But that’s yet another non-Flame solution.
Yea I think I’m getting it slowly by some patching here and there and some source noding parts and Frankensteining it. But I feel like there used to be a spark that could do this a long time ago.
There have been various plugins…Furnace Smart Fill was one. It was okay, worked some times for some things. There’s no such thing as the magic bullet with the scene you’re describing.