Hey. It is posibble to add option for remove dirts from movie? I mean any type of small scratches and black points from old movies.
Starlight Mini can help with this, but it’s efficacy is variable, depending upon the nature of the defect. I have experimented with a couple if different samples:
– A television program from 1987, where the master tape had a significant number of dropouts. In this case, many of the less extreme dropouts were removed or noticeably reduced. Those that were ‘thicker’ (vertical size) or persisted for more than a couple of frames show less or even little improvement.
– A movie from 1962 with typical old film damage - scratches, blotches, specks and dots, etc. Small flaws that were of short duration were often removed, as were some of the minor scratches.
In each case, it was least effective on defects that extend across the entire frame either horizontally or vertically, and are present for more than one frame. It dealt better with tape dropouts than with heavier vertical film scratches, to the point that it actually drew my attention to them because the much of the other noise in the frame was removed, leaving the continuous vertical lines standing out as obvious flaws.
It’s a conundrum of AI photo and video restoration, similar to the smooth skin/plastic appearance of faces that we’re seeing everywhere: it can make things look simultaneously very good, yet at the same time, very artificial.
I’m quite happy with Starlight Mini but there are no adjustments. WYSIWYG. It can make wonderful improvements to 99% of a video, but can also botch some elements, leaving them unusable. If the unacceptable parts are significant and you’ve used paid cloud credits for something you can’t use, it’s an an unpleasant situation.
This is one of the reasons I use it locally, despite the achingly-slow processing times. I’ll have a somewhat higher electric bill and have lost some time, but that’s more palatable than thinking that I’ve thrown money down the tubes.
