Cleaning scanned celluloid films

I've been asked to do a restore/clean up of scanned celluloid film footage. I currently use the following, but was wondering if anything else would be better:

1. FCPX Sharpen using 5.0 setting
2. Neat Video Reduce Noise v5
3. FCPX Color Wheels, followed by Broadcast Safe - just in case

Coremelt. "Paint X"

pszilard wrote: I've been asked to do a restore/clean up of scanned celluloid film footage. I currently use the following, but was wondering if anything else would be better...

You can rebalance faded or shifted color, and Neat Video can do some limited dust and scratch removal: www.neatvideo.com/support/how-to-use/dust-and-scratches

However FCPX and available plugins are not really designed for film restoration. You can easily spend a lot of time and have poor results. I'd hate to run Neat Video on several minutes of material.

A lot of problems happen during the telecine or scanning process, essentially locking in dust, scratches, etc. If the film is not scanned frame by frame, the quality is further degraded.

If possible the best solution is send the film to a professional service capable of doing "wet gate" scanning and restoration: www.posthouse.com

Yes it was a telecine conversion. Not the best, to say the least.

Thanks for the posthouse link. Have you used before?

I've never used PostHouse before, just saw their services. I have spent lots of time trying to clean up poor-quality telecine transfers and poor-quality 35mm slide scans. If at all possible it's worth having them done professionally with restoration equipment designed for that.

Here is a transfer done by "Transfer Lab" which they claim is good but IMO it's very poor quality. The dust & scratches worse than original and the sharpening is artificial. This is an example of what you *don't* want, whether in-house or out-sourced:

Vow, it looks pretty good at this size.

I have experimented with Sharpen filters both built-in and third party for years. NEVER have I seen one not introduce TONS of noise, making them all useless.

Go with the restoration service, save yourself hours and hours of headaches.