Hey gang! I’m working on a project that involves some cleanup of dust and scratches. I saw the film restoration tutorial and was wondering if it is possible to remove dust and scratches from video files (or automatically through image sequences). I’m new to this, so forgive me if I fall on my face on this. But some of the other (super expensive) software I have looked at mentions gaussian blurs as well, and I wasn’t sure if, since Shotcut uses it for the Reduce Noise filter, I could use it for those purposes. Thanks in advance for any help you’re able to provide!
I expect that you could use the “Reduce Noise” filter to reduce the visibility of dust and scratches. The Reduce Noise filter uses a gausian blur. You can configure the radius and strength of the blur with the first two parameters. The last parameter (threshold) tells the filter how much difference there must be between the original pixel and the blured pixel before it will keep the original pixel. If you set the threshold to zero, it will blur every pixel - as if it were just a gaussian blur filter on the whole image.
So I suggest you give the Reduce Noise filter a try and see if you can make any improvements with it.
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Thank you for the suggestion! So, here’s what I’ve got so far, in case it helps anybody else; as you said, zeroing the threshold got it to catch. But even when I tinkered with the radius and strength, the results were not that helpful, if only because what I’m working with has significant amounts of scratches, and the filter wasn’t really designed for it.
What I think it might be able to accomplish, though, is a makeshift mask, kind of like what people do in Adobe. I’ll tinker around with it, but there may be a way to combine the filter with multiple video tracks; isolating a specific part of the frame on track 2, blurring it, and overlaying it onto the first track. Best case scenario, it would help more with dust busting than with scratch removal, but it’s worth a shot.
Thank you for your help Brian!
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