Removing dust and scratches from film?

[KRSESQ]

I've cleaned these old films in preparation for transfer as well as possible, but some dust particles and scratches remain.

Anyone know of a filter (Photoshop/Premiere plugin, or stand alone app) which can clean up these films after transfer?

Kevin

[Dr Mordrid]

There are, of course, different ways to go on this.

There is a filter built into Photoshop called Dust & Scratches (it's in with the Noise filters) that is perfect for this kind of thing. No, it's not an *.8bf plugin that could be imported into MSPro.

If you have Premiere you can take advantage of its Filmstrip format to process short video segments (~2 seconds at a 480 frame height) in Photoshop, thereby giving you access to the Dust and Scratches filter.

Presuming the 480 frame height export the video from Premiere 2 seconds at a time using the filmstrip (*.flm) filetype then import that into Photoshop. The clip will look like a series of thumbnails stacked vertically; if enough frames are in the strip it'll be organized into columns.

Next use the Select All context menu and apply the Filters/Noise/Dust and Scratches filter to process them all at once. Dust and Scratches will have both radius and level controls you can use to tune the effect.

When finished save the sequence back out as another Filmstrip file and move to the next sequence. The processed filmstrip clips can then be re-loaded into Premiere for editing.

Tedious since you can only process 2 seconds at a time, but easier than working frame-by-frame.

Alternatively you could apply a low level Gaussian Blur to mitigate dust and scratches in a video editor. In MSPro a level of 1-3 would work in most cases. In Photoshop use the same levels but most often you'll want to set it to apply to just the "Horizontal" direction.

These are not as fine-tunable as using Photoshop/filmstrip but they are far less tedious.

Dr. Mordrid

[Nick Piercey]

Hi,


Not directly helping - but fascinating reading about how the old Doctor Who episodes have been cleaned up!

http://www.restoration-team.co.uk/

Nick.