I was watching the previously mentioned MPEG of The Phantom of the Opera with an eye toward cleaning up it, and found that by and large, it really is dreadful. The transfer seems very poorly focussed, so getting any reasonable detail out of it seemed difficult.

But, I thought I’d experiment anyway. I extracted five consecutive frames, averaged them, did a bit of burning and manipulation with softlight filters in the Gimp, and came up with:

Addendum: I worked up a second one to, showing the phantom. Yep, it’s blurry.

Fun.