removing film scratch lines

[Steve Rhoden]

Though i haven’t really tried it out on scratches….I would
suggest you give Newbluefx Video essentials II a try.
it has a surprisingly effective yet fast Noise reducing filter
that may offer you some good result.

Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Creative Arts Director and Film Maker.
Project Samples at:
http://www.youtube.com/hentys

[Hugh Macdonald]

I tried it and while it smoothed out the noise nicely, it did not remove the vertical scratches unless it posterized. The human interface for these plug ins is not very smart — circular knob type settings are a pain. Cute but not practical.

[Theo Van laar]

“The human interface for these plug ins is not very smart — circular knob type settings are a pain. Cute but not practical.”

Personally I am not a big fan of New Blue plugins. But for the practical side: just moving your mouse up and down will also do. You don’t have to rotate the mouse in order to make your settings.

Theo

[Hugh Macdonald]

It seems to me there should be some film oriented scratch remover… anybody know of one? I’ve heard of wavelet based, Bayesian based, but so far I can’t find a plug in or a practical method.

[Theo Van laar]

Did you try neat video (which is available as a Vegas plugin)?

https://www.neatvideo.com/examples.html

Theo

[Theo Van laar]

Are the scratches spread over the whole frame? Or just on the sides of the frame? In that case you could try Pixelans CleanCrop:

https://www.pixelan.com/ce/features-cc.htm

Theo

[Hugh Macdonald]

No, they are the most common type of scratch, a line (sometimes 2 or 3 lines) within the middle 60%, avoiding the edge since the sprockets give better support there. I used a convolution filter to detect the vertical line but you need one that detects a LONG vertical line.
Hugh

[Theo Van laar]

How long is the movie? If it is only a short piece, you can think of a clonestamp in e.g. AE

Theo

[Hugh Macdonald]

It is because of trying AE with filtering and clone stamp and finding it way too ugly and difficult that I went to Vegas. This clip, though short, has one main scratch, but in one spot 3 scratches show up, and multiple little ones.
Automatic methods I’ve read about (from computer department journals) find and track the scratches better than I could do with cloning or manually a frame at a time. By looking for long, thin, vertical edges it tracks the location of the scratch beautifully.
AE was very difficult and tracked well only if the scratch was deep and strong. Unfortunately, at one spot, the eyes of the subject are in the scratch, so a good method is required. The computerized method can use multiple frames to help detect the scratch.
Hughie