cleaning old footage speckles

[jriker1]

OK, so I have this b/w video from 1964. It's hideous. Video is crap, audio is even worse. I have used a combination of tools to clean things up. Video is excellent now compared to what it was and the audio is clear as well.

Problem I have left is there are a lot of the usual old film marks that are on the screen all the time. Is there any way to clean those up? They aren't entirely annoying or anything, even add to the effect for the era that it was filmed however still would like to try and eliminate it. Tools I used for the video cleaned up the staticy look of the video, but left the film effects intact so would like to try to clean those up as well if possible. Any ideas how to get rid of the old film marks and blotches that are in the video?

Thanks.

JR

[Blue_MiSfit]

post some samples, preferably untouched originals.

[Mug Funky]

probably best to remove them before you perform other noise reduction - it'll be more effective that way.

try a combination of fizick's "despot" (as in de-spot, not despot as in a violent dictator :)) and motion compensation.

this might work for you - you'll have to tweak the despot settings to avoid details being wiped out too (this script is un-tested)


function mcdespot (clip c, int "reset")
{
reset=default(reset,50)

vf=c.findmotion(reset=reset,from=previous,initialise=6,iterate=2)
vb=c.findmotion(reset=reset,from=next,initialise=6,iterate=2)

interleave(c.swc(vf,bilinear=true),c,c.swc(vb,source=next,bilinear=true))
despot(show=0,pwidth=16,pheight=16,p1=54,mthres=20,p2=16)
selectevery(3,1)
}

you'll need fizick's "despot" and clouded/mg262's "motion" to run this.

it's reasonably fast, but probably needs tweaking (right now it's very sensitive to white dots, but might mistake highlights as spots, which shouldn't hurt too much because it's motion compensated).

[jriker1]

Here is an uncleaned and cleaned screen shot as with the file limits I can't upload even 10 seconds of video.
6670

6671

[jriker1]

Here are a couple others on a mostly black background which shows the artifacts more.
6672

6673

Note that the visual is better through a TV screen as the computer monitors are kind of dark.

[chipzoller]

Can you post your script used to filter those examples?

[jriker1]

I actually didn't use a filter per se. I used a method mentioned here before, with slightly different tools in some cases. Here is what I did:

1. Open up the video file in a program called VideoToImages by PresentaVid. It's Freeware.

2. Had it extract each frame as a TIFF file. You could also probably use VirtualDubMod (File > Save as Imave Sequence) but didn't try that. I also tried avisynth with ImageSource but for some reason a lot of the frames were garbage when I viewed them.

3. I open up a frame with a plain wall or something without a lot of different textures in NeatImage Pro. Tried Noiseware also but didn't get the same results.

4. Created a noise profile and saved it to the hard drive.

5. Created a noise filter which takes some visual tweaking and saved that filter to the hard drive as well.

6. Ran a single image through NeatImage's batch at 48-bit TIFF as it then saves that setting for future ones. You can't set that through the next steps.

7. I used NeatBatch to create pieces of the rest of the scripts. Some parts of it wouldn't work as generated.

8. Use NeatBatch AVI and answered all the questions providing the before saved profile and filter in the program. I usually use 8.3 filename conventions in this DOS tool as it seems to error at the end when you use things like "Program Files".

9. NeatBatch will create a batch file to run each frame through NeatImage using the saved profile and filter. I had to modify:

%i% %a%00000.tif" %d%00000.tif" %e% %f% /mf /sl

to

%i% %a%000000.tif" %d%000000.tif" %e% %f% /sl

For some reason NeatImage didn't like the /mf flag that was put in there.

10. After it is done saving the new cleaned TIFF files to a different folder, I open up VirtualDubMod and load an AVISynth script like the one below that was generated by NeatBatch:

ImageSource(file = "k:\t\t\image_%06d.tif", start = 0, end = 42061, fps = 29.971)

This was updated with frame rate.

I then do a File > Save As in VirtualDubMod and save as an uncompressed AVI file.

And you are done.

Obviously a very large amount of hard drive space and time consuming. But the results are very pleasing. There have been a lot of posts about issues with using image cleanup tools on video, but I am amazed at the results.

As a side note, I use VirtualDub to merge the original audio and video back together. There are references in this forum to using Nandub over VirtualDub however I found the audio did not quite sound right using it for some reason.

With video this bad the audio is pretty bad also. For reference I used Waves Restoration in Sound Forge to clean up the hissing and crackling.

Now if I could get rid of the last bit of legacy things in the image that would be great, however all in all quite an improvement.