Vertical Film Lines removal

[goodiesguy]

I've tried DeScratch in AvsPmod (via AviSynth) but haven't had satisfactory results, and it's tended to remove more than the lines, or anything BUT the lines.

Any ideas here? I've attached a film clip.

[johnmeyer]

I've transferred and restored a lot of film. Continuous scratches are extremely difficult to remove not only because they persist from one frame to the next, but because the darn lines wander just enough that you can't use a mask to remove them.

Like you, I was never able to get DeScratch to do anything useful.

If you had access to the film, you can remove the scratches almost completely during the transfer by using a "wet gate." This involves temporarily coating the film with a slightly viscous liquid which mechanically fills in the scratches and renders them optically invisible. Since this is a film about the Bee Gees, I'm guessing you don't have access to the print from which the video was made.

For lines which don't wander, you can use something like Delogo or MSU Logo Logo Remover. Both let you create a mask by taking a snapshot of a frame, and then painting over the scratch with a specific color (pure red is often used). These tools are designed to remove logos, but they will remove anything that is under the mask. This won't work for scratches which wander, but might work very well for those which stay put.

I created a short tutorial which shows how to use Delogo to remove a small dot that resulted from dust on the camera sensor. It will give you some idea of what's involved in using this tool:

Delogo Tutorial

Another thing to try is RemoveDirt. It has an astounding ability to remove transient dirt that doesn't persist from frame to frame, but for scratches which wander a lot, it can also remove them. The only problem is that it may remove the scratches for a few frames and then, when the scratch stops wandering, the scratch will come back.

A third option is a relatively new tool which is a script called SpotLess. It was developed by StainlessS over at doom9.org. I have used it a couple of times in the past six weeks, and it has some very interesting abilities to remove artifacts that other tools don't touch. It can look at multiple frames to help determine what needs to be removed. So far I have been able to do some very interesting things with it:

https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/398864-Need-help-on-Avisynth?highlight=spotless#post2595644

[Selur]

my two cents: multiple DeScratch (http://avisynth.nl/users/fizick/descratch/descratch.html) calls (with different settings) should help with the vertical lines

Cu Selur