While I was encoding videos over the weekend, I wrote a simple little filter to average consecutive frames to produce less noisy versions of title cards. I tested it on 25 frames from the titles of The Vampire Bat.
It looks a little soft because I haven’t worked out the registration, but it nicely eliminated various frame artifacts like dust and scratches. I’ve got the silly idea that relatively simple processing like this can make relatively bad prints such as this one into more attractive prints, if not actually good ones. I’ll have to work on it some more in the future.
Addendum: This might be a good place to start with a more sophisticated version.
this looks very interesting…! is there any chance of you releasing a filter like that for final cut (express/pro)…? i’ve been experimenting a bit with very basic filters trying for a similar effect with archive.org footage, but obviously this can’t be as effective as a more specialised tool. and i could imagine, that there might be quite a few people interested in a filter like that…
Editor’s note: It’s mostly just random experimentation using code from ffmpeg. Still, I think it would a fun open source gadget, maybe I’ll try to commit some brain cells to it in the future.