Masktools for denoising

[Lil' Jer]

Just as a background I am trying to make backup DVDs of my remastered Japanese City Hunter Box set. I'm going to be authoring the DVDs and adding subtitles from the US discs to them. For some reason it seems when old shows like this are remastered from film prints they never seem to do any grain removal so like with other shows the grain is quite heavy and I want to do some cleanup before authoring. Now, I can run a string of filters to clean up the grain but it results in a way oversmoothed look. So I thought maybe as a solution I could use masktools and try to create masks to detect just the grain and then clean it from there in a hope that it would create a much better look.

The only problem is for the life of me no matter how many times I read the masktools docs, I just can't seem to wrap my head around how to create such a mask and how I would feed this mask to the denoiser. I'm posting a small sample clip for people to work with and I appreciate any help you can provide to lead me in the right direction. That or if I'm completely off base with what I'm trying to do tell me so.

[foxyshadis]

You would probably use luts to create the mask. See any Didée filter for wanton abuse of these. Then apply the mask like mt_merge(orig,new,mask,chroma="process").

For examples of this, see limitedsharpen or smartssiq (though that one needs to be switched to mt_mask rather than overlay).