Blackmagic Cintel Scanner User Manual  Automatic Dirt Removal

The Automatic Dirt Removal plugin uses optical flow technology to target and repair temporally unstable bits of dust, dirt, hair, tape hits, and other unwanted artifacts that last for one or two frames and then disappear. All repairs are made while maintaining structurally consistent detail in the underlying frame, resulting in a high quality restoration of the image. Fortunately, despite its sophistication, this is a relatively easy plugin to use; just drop the plugin on a shot, adjust the parameters for the best results, and watch it go.

(Top) Original image, (Bottom) Using Automatic Dirt Removal

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NOTE This plugin is less successful with vertical scratches that remain in the same position for multiple frames and is completely ineffective for dirt on the lens that remains for the entire shot.

Main Controls

The primary controls used to adjust how much dirt is removed from the image.

• Motion Estimation Type: Lets you choose from among ‘none’, ‘faster’, ‘normal’, and ‘better’. This tunes the tradeoff between performance and quality.

• Neighbor Frames: Lets you choose how many frames to compare when detecting dirt. Choosing more frames of comparison takes longer to process, but usually results in finding more dirt and artifacts.

• Repair Strength: This slider lets you choose how aggressively to repair dirt and artifacts that are found. Lower settings may let small bits through that may or may not be actual dirt, while higher settings eliminate everything that’s found.

• Dirt Size Threshold: This slider lets you tune how large a detected bit of dirt must be to be removed. Raising this parameter lets you omit things like film grain from the operation but may allow smaller bits of dirt through.

• Show Repair Mask: This checkbox lets you see the dirt and artifacts that are detected by themselves, so you can see the effectiveness of the results as you fine tune this filter.

Fine Controls

These controls let you fine tune the effect in an effort to perfect the tradeoff between removing dirt successfully and preserving true image detail.

• Motion Threshold: This slider lets you choose the threshold at which pixels in motion are considered to be dirt and artifacts. At lower values more dirt may escape correction, but you’ll experience fewer motion artifacts. At higher values, more dirt will be eliminated, but you may experience more motion artifacts in footage with camera or subject motion.

• Edge Ignore: This slider lets you exclude hard edges in the picture from being affected by dirt or artifacts that are removed. Higher values omit more edges from being affected.