"Paint Shop" editing of individual frames - easy way?

[2Bdecided]

Let's say I have S-VHS and VHS tapes copied into my PC.

Some of those tapes contain drop outs, which appear on-screen as brief horizontal lines. The automatic drop-out compensation (VHS HQ?) in the VCR has tried to hide them - I remember older VCRs showed them as bright white lines, whereas newer VCRs often seem to duplicate the content from the previous line to try to hide the problem.

I don't know of a way of automatically fixing these (suggestions welcome!) so I was going to try to fix the most objectionable ones using a clone / image repair tool in a photo editor (I have Corel Photo Paint, which is the same sort of thing as the more popular Photo Shop).

The thing is, dumping out all the frames, dragging them one-by-one into an editor, and then putting them all back together again will take forever.

What I'd like is a tool with an interface like VirtualDub (just play, frame advance, and frame back really!) which lets me "paint" onto any frame I want. It needs to work with raw RGB AVIs, and preferably HuffYUV and DV. I don't expect it to work with anything else.

I know the BBC restoration team have a paint box (scratch box?) which lets them go through film transfers frame-by-frame and paint out film damage. I think that's just what I want! I guess that hardware costs thousands. Is there a free software version? :)

Cheers,
David.

P.S. I'm sorry if this is the wrong sub-forum. Given that I'm asking about something to edit video which doesn't have its own "Capturing and Editing video" sub-forum, I wasn't sure where to put it.

[communist]

FilmGimp, now called CinePaint - basically just what you want. IIRC it only takes image sequences - but that shouldn be a problem.
http://www.cinepaint.org/

I think PhotoShop CS3 Extended can also work on video files - though expect to pay some good chunk of money for it.

Alternatively you may want to try some AviSynth filtering (one of Fizick's plugins?).

[2Bdecided]

Thanks communist.

CinePaint seems all-but-broken on windows.

Corel Photo Paint will also let you load in RGB AVIs, but it's painful!

Cheers,
David.

[Fizick]

I recall lbkiller
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?threadid=80859

[2Bdecided]

It's closer, but it doesn't let me paint easily from one frame to another.

The BBC have a nice tool for video restoration - it's a video tablet, and when you paint on it, it deletes the current frame at that pixel, and replace it with the previous frame. Great for editing out single frame video/film glitches.

So basically, I'm looking for that multi thousand pound tool, but for free, and on my PC via a mouse. ;)

Cheers,
David.

[Joel Cairo]

Well, essentially all Scratchbox does is layer two adjacent frames, along with a decimation tool to delete damaged areas from the "top" frame. The image from the frame underneath then "fills in" the holes. The new composite frame is then created, stored and called as a replacement to the damaged frame in the final output stream.

Frankly, given the enormous complexity of the scripts that are written here on a regular basis, I'm surprised that no one has gotten around to this sort of filter yet, but maybe it's just too trivial.

Having said that, if someone is going to try, my suggestion would be to make the decimation tool switchable between an expandable geometric shape and a stylus/pencil-type (for user-defined areas). A "feathering" or gradient option to blend the edges of the edited areas would be nice, too...

Just some ideas...

-Kevin

[Leak]

Frankly, given the enormous complexity of the scripts that are written here on a regular basis, I'm surprised that no one has gotten around to this sort of filter yet, but maybe it's just too trivial.
Errr... it might be because interactive frame editing and AviSynth just don't mix - all AviSynth does is return frames, and it's up to the application to actually display them, request new frames to move around in the video and handle the user's mouse clicks and paint strokes on the frame.

So if anything, this would have to be a stand-alone application that most probably wouldn't even gain much, if anything from using AviSynth...

np: The Orb - Spanish Castles In Space (Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld Deluxe Edition (Disc 1))