Can anything be done about tracking noise that's part of the image?

[brassplyer]

If you've got noise that's the result of someone duping a tape that already had tracking noise and is therefore a permanent part of the image, is there anything that can be done to substantially reduce it? By "anything" I mean besides paying Industrial Light And Magic or whoever hundreds of thousands of dollars to do a frame-by-frame CGI clean up - i.e. that can be done with Virtualdub, etc.

Thanks.

[redwudz]

Probably nothing simple. If it's lines of noise drifting up and down the screen, very hard to clean it up.

But post a screen shot, or preferred, a short clip of it, and we can take a look and maybe give some better advice. Ten - twenty seconds should be enough. Max file size is 6MB, but it can be a little smaller to speed download. Or post it on a sharing site like RapidShare or similar.

[brassplyer]

Probably nothing simple. If it's lines of noise drifting up and down the screen, very hard to clean it up.

But post a screen shot, or preferred, a short clip of it, and we can take a look and maybe give some better advice..

What I'm referring to is the "snow" that shows up, largely at the top and/or bottom of the screen when the tracking is off.

Like this.

[redwudz]

I doubt you can do much good, but there is a VHS filter that may clean up the rest of the picture. http://neuron2.net/flaxen/flaxen.html

For the noise, probably cropping it out is the only real cure.

The Deemon site has a few VD filters listed: http://www.thedeemon.com/VirtualDubFilters/ I use ColorMill a lot, but it's for color correction, not noise.

[lordsmurf]

Don't crop, but rather mask it.

A better VCR often helps. Something professional. See VCR buying guide in restoration forum.

[redwudz]

Good point, lordsmurf. An unfortunate choice of words by me. Cropping would change the frame size and cause other problems. If you did crop, you would have to resize. VD can also add a black mask over the noise. Admittedly not a great alternative. If the noise is part of the tape, then likely no help from tracking adjustments, but always worth a try.

Another alternative, though not so great either, would be to use a Delogo filter with VD and just blur the noise.