A lot of my underwater PAL DV footage has black corners where the edge of the lens/port are visible. In most clips it is only on the left side. On a few it is on both sides. The size of the vignetting varies a little with time because of auto-exposure and in-camera image stablisation.
Here is 2 seconds of typical PAL DV source. And here is a screenshot:
In the past I've repaired this in Sony Vegas by masking off the corners, copying the clip to a lower track, and moving it to the left so that the footage immediately to the right shows through. In some cases the result is pretty good:
In other cases not so good:
And in cases where there is detail next to the corner, it just doesn't really work, although arguably it's still less noticeable than ugly black corners:
I'm wondering if anyone has a better way to repair this sort of thing? Obviously the last example is near-impossible, but for the open-water shots it would be great if there was some way to read the first "clean" pixels around the corner and then paint those over the darkened corners... Or perhaps some sort of inverse barrel distortion? Ideally I don't really want to just crop the footage.
Thanks!