Vertical Scratch Solutions

[Eluthingol]

Hi All,

This resto is moving along pretty well. The biggest issue I have is with the vertical scratch damage that is heavily prominent throughout this film. How would some of you veterans handle these (see the dude on the right in the pic)?

Many Thanks!
Joe

[Attachment 94051 - Click to enlarge]

[kissvid]

I am not an expert by any means but when I was working on my own family films, Neat Video was awesome for eliminating dirt scratches and lines. Like I said I am not an expert at all but it worked beautifully for me. Hope that helps a little. https://www.neatvideo.com/

[fred_abila]

Neat Video is great for grain and dirt, but long vertical scratches are a different problem. They sit in roughly the same place for many frames, so temporal dirt removers (RemoveDirt, SpotLess, Resolve's Automatic Dirt Removal) mostly leave them alone.

The usual tool for this is the DeScratch plugin for AviSynth (by Fizick, and there's an AviSynth+ 64-bit build). It looks for thin vertical lines that are lighter or darker than their neighbours and fills them from the pixels on either side, frame by frame. Start with something like DeScratch(mindif=4, maxwidth=3), then tune mindif (how much contrast counts as a scratch) and maxwidth (scratch width in pixels) until it catches the lines without eating real verticals like door frames or poles. Run it before any denoising or sharpening, and check high-detail scenes, since it can soften real vertical edges.

For the few heavy scratches it misses, fixing them per shot works better than frame-by-frame painting: if a scratch stays put through a shot, a narrow mask over it plus a fill from the neighbouring columns (in AviSynth, or Patch Replacer if you have Resolve Studio) is much quicker.

If you can post a short sample clip rather than a still, and say which software you're restoring in, people here can suggest more specific settings.

[johnmeyer]

I have done a lot of film restoration and have never found a solution for vertical scratches. If you have the film (which you don't) you can use a "wet gate" transfer where you coat the film with a solution which "fills in" the scratch.

The problem with vertical scratches is that they wander back and forth. This wandering is more than just gate weave, so you can't get the scratch to stand still simply by stabilizing the video. If you could get the scratch to appear in the same location from one frame to the next, you could use any one of several tools to replace it with adjacent pixels. As Fred just mentioned, you can do this frame-by-frame, but that is obviously too tedious for something like this.

The other problem with scratches is that there are usually several of them. Also, they come and go.

I've never had any luck with Descratch, but I haven't used in ages, and maybe you can make it work. It is worth a try.

[Selur]

Share a small clip (ideally unfiltered, since the image looks already heavily denoise and sharpened)
There are multiple approaches to this.
a. if the scratch is static, creating a mask filling the 'gaps' through either interpolating or inpainting is possible
b. if the scratch wander, descratch or adjusted filters can help

Cu Selur

[themaster1]

Oh i would handle it pretty simply with heavy artillery