How to patch damage with a selection from the next frame?

Hi, I restore old films which are often full of artifacts visible in frames such as reel change markers and splice lines.

I used to use some great iMovie plug-ins made by a guy in Switzerland which allowed me to use effects called "Picture-in-picture, Circle" or "Split/Slant,Top (or Right or Bottom or Left) to remove such damage. These were very convenient in that if a reel change marker appeared in a frame, I could create a circular area with a soft edge over the ring-shaped damage and assign the program to fill that circle with an image from the subsequent frame which would be "clear" of the problem.The Split/Slant effect worked similarly and could be used to replace the top or bottom area of an image where a splice mark appeared with the top or bottom area, again divided by a soft edge, of the next frame. Artifact gone.

Reel change markers and splices are pretty big sometimes and may cover areas with text in them or other background objects which can't be replaced with a cloned area from somewhere else in the frame.

I see that in Resolve there are ways to patch images but apparently only Photoshop-style, cloning an area from somewhere else in the same frame.

I don't want to replace a damaged frame with another part of the damaged frame, the goal is to replace it with an area from the UNDAMAGED next frame, which doesn't have the problem and contains the information I want to replace in the damaged frame!

I just want to patch an area of one frame with part of an image that already exists in the a subsequent frame, one way or another. But I cannot see any way to do this. Anyone know how making this kind of patch can be accomplished in Resolve? I've been looking for ways to do it for weeks and cannot find anything.

You can do this easily using the OFX Frame Replacer effect constrained by a Power Window.
(Gel Shockers rule!)

You can also use the Paint node in Clone mode and use the Time Offset.

The OFX Dust Buster plug-in is literally intended for this very thing: you patch a small piece of film damage (or even digital video) with information from the frame before or the frame afterwards. All of this is covered in the Revival section of the Resolve manual, starting on p. 3352. There are tricks you can use in order to hide the dirt most effectively, with the fewest amount of artifacts.

Where it gets complicated, as with Reel Changeover Cue Marks, is if the shot is moving while the shots are going on. You need a clean piece of background material in order to do a fix like this, and it may better be done with painting it out with adjacent pixels, which is a feature of Fusion.

Thank you very much, guys, for your suggestions. I have been working on this for days with no success.

I would like to use the paint option as it would seem to just allow you to take image information from a following frame but I can't figure out the work flow.

The Frame Replace/power window thing is also complicated and I have not been on the program long enough to figure out how to get that all going either.

I have been using the Dust Buster but getting mixed results on things but did not understand why. I get why that was happening, though. In the past I used to confine an area to be replaced to the smallest size possible to minimize any fluctuation in detail. I was trying to do the same with the dust buster but now realize that it actually does better if you give it a LARGER selection so its AI can compare more of various frames to each other.

I was finally after working all day on this able to successfully remove reel change markers from the end of a new transfer of a chapter of THE PHANTOM CREEPS. Your advice contributed here and is very much appreciated & I will try working with all 3 methods in the future to see if I can get them to work better or more simply. I need a one on one session with someone to figure out some of the other workflow stuff but thanks to you I will be able to finish the project now.

Hi Guys, I thank you again for your previous advice but unfortunately the dust buster attempts to eliminate reel change markers don't always work because half the time it will do what IT wants, not what you ask it to, no matter what instruction you give it.

As I mentioned, what I wanted to do was patch an area of a frame with a section of the image directly from the next frame.

After much fuss, what I discovered was that I could copy a clip of a frame or more from a frame next to the one that had a mark on it such as a reel change artifact that was what needed to be eliminated, move it up to a second track above the main one, replace the moved clip with a pasted copy, then move the clip on track 2 over so it was above the frame on track 1 with the mark to be eliminated, then crop the track 2 frame at the left and bottom so only the top right area would be pasted over.

This does what I want directly but I sure wish there were an option to just select a circular or square area in any frame and ask the program to replace the selected area with image from the next frame.

Maybe in the next update something like that could be added in. Such an effect would be very useful and save a hell of a lot of time if you could just select an area and hit a button that says REPLACE SELECTION WITH AREA FROM NEXT FRAME or something like that.

In iMovie the effect was called either Picture in Picture, Circle (or rectangle) or Split-Slant-Left,, Top, Bottom, or Right.

Missing that a lot right now.

You can replace an area with the Paint tool in Clone mode in Fusion. In the picture below I added a black dot to one frame of a video. I then used the Paint tool in clone mode to paint out that dot with the frame before it, you can choose any frame you want before or after.