Restoration Work Flow

[DMS]

Hi All

Is there a recommended work flow for restoration work?

Should it be:

1: Stabilise
2: Dirt & Dust Removal
3: De-Noise
4: Colour Balance
5: Resize/Crop

Cheers

DMS

[super8rescue]

I always do my colour work first
I rarely use stabilize but that should be done first imo.
I never need resize/crop
I do dirt and dust last
I don't have noise issues.

Other may have a different work flow.

[lordsmurf]

- I save color for last. Reason being it can get obliterated during chroma noise removal and various NR.
- Be very careful with resize/crop.
- dirt/dust = denoise = NR, same thing.

1 stabilize (because it can use noise as a vector)
2 NR + chroma NR
3 color work
4 crop/mask/resize

[johnmeyer]

We've done a lot of work on restoring movie film, over in the doom9.org forum. Restoring video is quite similar, although there are a few things specific to film, like dirt removal, which don't apply.

This is the order we use:

Motion stabilization
Denoising
Sharpening
Frame interpolation (if changing the frame rate, common for film, but also done for video when deinterlacing, etc.)
Gamma correction
Color correction

Motion stabilization should always be done first because otherwise your other steps, many of which look at adjacent frames, will degrade the image because they will think that things which have changed between frames are noise. The order of the other steps matters less.

[lollo]

I do:

- levels and colors correction before filtering
- stabilization (if needed)
- clean (if needed) [remove dirt, different from denoise]
- denoise
- dehalo (if needed)
- sharpen
- levels correction after filtering [Luma only]
- colors correction in VirtualDub (if needed)

[DMS]

Thank you all for the replies. It’s good to get an explanation of why it’s done in that order.

Cheers

DMS

[lordsmurf]

Much like noise, colors can affect stabilization. You want ALL problems to still exist at that stage. It has to be as unprocessed as possible. That's one of the few times I also suggested EDIT mode on S-VHS decks. It must be first.

Color correction must be last.

The rest is slightly fungible. I choose to mask last because NR/CC can cause halo on masking. You also want to resize after most other work.

[super8rescue]

Perhaps I should have added in my reply that my colour work is only with cine film, so I have a completely different approach.
It was unclear from your O/P what your content is.