CineFrameCleaner - Help

FrameCleaner Version 1.5 2020-07-28 ---- Copyright © Wolfgang Kurz, 2020

Table of Content

Introduction

The "CineFrameCleaner" is a program that allows to remove dirt spots, fluff amd other distortions from the scanned frames of a cine film. Additional functions of the program are a) the smooting of colors if these colors appear fluffy due to an image sharpening process and b) the crreation of video clips using FFMPEG.

The removal of the dirt is (as far as possible) supported by specific program features, but a fully automatic process is not possible, due to the lack of sufficiently strong criteria that allow to distinguish dirt from normal image content. Here the human decission capabilities must be used in order to find the image distortions.

The image cleaning is performed by presenting the scanned and stored film frames in the graphical user interface (GUI) of the program. The image to be cleaned appears in the left pane of the GUI in a standardized format (800x600 pixels, image ratio 4:3 - the standard ratio of cine films). In the upper right pane the preceeding image is presented in half the size of the left image and in the lower right pane the following image is presented also in half size. These images function as reference images to ease the detection of distortions. An identified distortion has to be marked in the left image with the mouse by drawing a red rectangle around this distortion. The dirt pixels will then be replaced by the corresponding pixels in the selected comparishion image.

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Distribution, Programinstallation and Programinvocation

The application is developed under MS Windows 10 using Visual Studio 2020, exploiting MS .NET 4.7.2 and Accord .NET 3.8.2. That means .NET 4.7.2 and Accord .NET 3.8.2 must be installed on your computer.
The application is delivered as a packed ZIP file (packed with 7Zip). The required Accord .NET files are included. To install the application it is sufficient to unpack the file into a folder of your choice on you computer. Recommended is to create a folder named "FrameCleaner" in "Program Files" folder on your computers C:/ drive.
To execute the application a Windows 64Bit operation system is desirable, but a 32 Bit operation system is also useable if enough main memory is available. Recommended is Windows 7 or better.
To uninstall the application it is sufficient to delete the installation library. The Windows Repository is not used.

If your installation folder is "C:/Program Files/FrameCleaner" the invocation is either done via the command prompt using the command "C:/Program Files/FrameCleaner/FrameCleaner.exe"
or via a shortcut on your desktop (see following picture):

Via the button "Change Icon..." you can set the broom symbol for the FrameCleaner shortcut [ ]. It is located in the installation folder as file "besen32-32.ico".

As parameters for the program invocation you can provide 2 values:

  1. The selection of the presentation language. "EN" for English, "DE" for German.
    and
  2. The URL for the cinefilm image library: e.g. "C:\VideoProjects".

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The Enduser Interface (GUI)

The Menues "File", "Functions" and "Help"

The Submenues to Control the Program

The Image Cleaning Process

The FFMPEG Video Generation Dialog

The image color smoothing dialog

Convert negative images to positive images (BW only)

Last changes: July 30, 2020 WK