Removing scratches in the actual film during restoration?

[amiableakuma]

Is there an at least somewhat easy way to remove things like scratches, "cigarette burns", marks and the like from a piece of footage you have?

I have some DVDs that have content about 10 years old on them and while I've been able to have a satisfying amount of success "remastering" their footage (after I turn it into an AVI with AutoGK) by just doing simple stuff like running it through TMPGEnc and using the "advanced tools" such as Noise Restoration, the Sharpen filter, etc. --- one thing that clearly remains are the defects like scratches on the actual film.

So is the any program that exists that can sort of find such blemishes in the film and reduce or remove their appearance? Any other options at all?

Thanks for your help...

[redwudz]

You could try VirtualDub Mod and some filters. There are many VD filters available for VD and Avisynth at:http://neuron2.net/ and you should find some that would help. I believe there are some 'scratch' filters there. I wouldn't expect miracles, though.

[zoobie]

you can always take them out frame by frame...

[guns1inger]

For the best quality, you can either export the affected frames as a filmstrip and work on them frame by frame in Photoshop, or export as uncompressed AVI and work on them in After effects/Combustion/Fusion etc.

[amiableakuma]

I will likely look into the things mentioned.

But based on your comments - I take it that there's (currently) certainly no easy way to remove scratches/etc if you don't know exactly where they are in the print and/or if you have hundreds of hours of footage that will need scratch removal a few times every couple minutes.

Would that be the general consensus? Somebody answer me this...

[Barnabas]

MSU has a VirtualDub filter in the works that will filter film scratches, but they have been pretty slow to release new or upgraded filters. Been waiting on their new logo filter since September, when the new version was "supposed" to have been available.

Here is a link to the film filter info:

http://www.compression.ru/video/old_film_recover/index_en.html

[mats.hogberg]

Buy the Metropolis DVD - There's a whole section of extra material on how that old film was restored. Amazing work, I must say.

/Mats

[guns1inger]

The same with Rear Window - and it was restored chemically, not digitally. Serious restoration needs a lot of hands on love and care.

[fritzi93]

Look on this page for descratch25.dll (scratch removal filter):

http://www.avisynth.org/warpenterprises/

Supposedly new, haven't tried it yet myself. Also look here:

http://bag.hotmail.ru

Tried to locate some documentation, but got server error. Anyway, to reiterate, don't expect miracles.

[EDIT] Okay found some documentation, looks promising:

http://www.avisynth.org/fizick/descratch/descratch.html