How to remove moving lines in night footage

[1422ab]

I have a video that I made out of a plane as it took off. It was a post-dusk takeoff and the sky was nearly pitch black, however the airport terminal in the background is extremely bright. I have a bunch of moving lines in each frame as you get closer to the bright terminal and I can't figure out how to get them out.

I've tried a few things in After Effects. First, I tried to use a Gaussian Blur mask over the entire sky up to just beyond the point where the lines are moving, using a 100 point feather. Second, I tried a solid mask the color of the sky again with a 100 point feather, however neither of them work well. The Gaussian Blur reduces the number of lines and cleans them up, but they still exits. The solid color mask made just too hard of a transition from dark sky to light sky.

What I need is a graduated transition between the dark and light sky, but I don't know how to do that. I assume there is a filter for such, but I wouldn't know what to call it. Every time I search for "Transition," "Dissolve," etc yields the traditional scene change transitions, not transitions within a single frame.

Any help is appreciated. I've attached a small sample video.

[poisondeathray]

The edges of banding/compression artifacts can be filtered within AE using a denoiser such as Neat Video

There are other options/plugins for AE, but NV is one of the better ones

Or you can use other programs to deblock/denoise/dither the artifacts, such as avisynth/vapoursynth/ffmpeg

[jagabo]

Try GradFun3() in AviSynth.

cropped original on left, Gradfun3() in the right: