Preparing for Dust Removal
Chapter 9, Removing Dust

Use the Dust Removal tools in Lustre to remove dust, hair, speckles, and other artefacts on your shots. Lustre removes artefacts for you by cloning pixels over them. The cloned pixels may come from the identical location on the previous and next frames, or from the area surrounding the artefact on the current frame, depending on the repair method that you use. You can locate artefacts on each frame yourself, or use an automatic method of artefact detection over one or more shots.

Dust removal can be done at any time in the project workflow. Also, you can do more than one dust removal pass on the footage. For example, you may choose to perform the main dust removal early on in the project, render the results, and then do a final pass (quality check) after all colour grading is complete.

You can perform dust removal on the original 2K shots or on 1K generated proxies. Working on the 2K version may provide more accurate removal. However, the process will be completed more quickly when using 1K proxies, particularly in the case of automatic removal.

Dust metadata is saved independently of the colour grading data, in a text file stored with the footage. This makes it possible to remove dust on one system while grading on another. You can then combine the metadata into one completed project. Dust removal is non-destructive to the original footage. If you decide to replace the original footage with cleaned up frames, a copy of the original frame is saved and given a unique name. This file can be restored if needed.