AI for Dustbusting & Scratch Removal on Digital Scans of Film

Hey, y’all! Has anyone found an AI that can do decent dustbusting on digital scans of an old film? I see a ton of uprezzing stuff & coloring, etc., but nothing regarding dust pops & scratches. TIA for any leads!

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Interesting question - on the surface, it seems that those problems may be harder for ML algorithms, as you’re looking at fine detail, rather than larger sections that need to be regenerated, and there’s a heavy temporal element to it, which ML algorithms tend to have problems with - at least for now. Those kinds of fixes seem more suited for procedural algorithms.

I don’t think you can use Mocha’s remove tool for this at present, but it’s logic is probably closest that I can think off, where it searches for matching patterns in neighboring frames and then patches based on that.

NeatVideo has.

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+1 for neat video.

Topaz Video AI is one worth checking out:

I’ve only used it for uprezing, but they show restored footage as an example of stuff it’s models can do.

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I messed with their demo version, but I don’t see any controls pertaining to dust, hair, & scratch removal, just flicker & stabilization stuff. Thanx, though!

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Yeah, NV seems to be the way to go for now. Tysm!

Yeah, NV seems to be the way to go for now. Tysm!

Ah, this is an interesting idea! I’ll have to play around with it. Tysm!

Bummer it didn’t work well for it. I wasn’t sure. I had only used for uprezing.

It sounds like what you are looking for is more of a film restoration and repair app. Off the top of my head The Pixel Farm has PFClean. There might be one or two other apps that are used in that world.

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When I was working on the walking dead and they were still shooting on 16mm I did some research into film restoration software and stumbled upon this. Never used it, just dust busted and fixed film warps in flame tediously, but I thought it looked great. Probably overkill for what you need but putting it into the ether DIAMANT-Film Restoration / HS-ART Digital - Welcome to HS-ART Digital - The maker of the DIAMATN-Film Restoration Software

but this is super expensive between 6k and 20k just so you know