Advanced Optical Flow Techniques For Image Repair

Using Optical Flow to repair corruped frames or remove non-standard film pull-down patterns

Two problems that I see regularly with my projects are single corrupted frames within a longer media file, and irregular patterns of repeated frames. This happens frequently on drone shots or archival footage that has been previously time- or frame-rate converted and needs to be cleanly re-mapped into the current timeline.

Often, both of these problems can be cleanly solved using optical flow retiming tools.

That’s right – optical flow isn’t just for slowing shots down for dramatic effect – it’s also a powerful tool for image repair. In fact, any time you want to create a brand new frame in between two clean frames, optical flow is a great solution.

Key take-aways from this Insight

By then end of this Insight you should understand:

• When you should consider optical flow for image repair
• How to segment out a bad frame and prepare it for optical flow
• Why using render-in-place is important for optical flow (instead of compound clips)
• How to apply the same technique to archival film, removing repeated frames

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