Moiré patterns

me_again wrote on 9/2/2026, 3:07 AM

Greetings,

A couple of days ago I found a micro SD that I thought was lost forever due to some intense stupidity on my part that I won't go into here. It has footage of a holiday we had with our Grandpeeps in 2022, taken on a Samsung Galaxy phone. This morning I've started to edit it.

The videos are in MP4 AVC format, 1920x1080 progressive and variable framerate and up until now MS2025 hasn't grumbled about it.

However, now I've come across a short scene of our granddaughter dancing. Nothing wrong with the clip, it's sharp and motion is good, not really requiring any effects as it stands. The problem is, she's in front of a large picture window with blue Venetian Blinds behind her that are down and almost closed; the Moiré patterns are really distracting.

I've tried everything in my arsenal with varying degrees of failure and because this is the first time this century that I've had this moiré problem, coupled with the fact that the clip is only 21 seconds long, I'm reluctant to invest in any more effects. I certainly don't want to send it over the ether to somewhere in the world for alleged AI processing.

I know it's a forlorn hope but has anyone any idea what can be done?

AndyW

Comments

emmrecs wrote on 9/2/2026, 8:29 AM

@me_again

Hi Andy,

No immediate suggestions but, and I fully understand if this is not possible because of the content of the footage and your need to protect your granddaughter, if the footage could be uploaded somewhere and a link to download it made available directly to users who you "know and trust", it might be possible to find some kind of solution.

Jeff

johnebaker wrote on 9/2/2026, 1:14 PM

@me_again

Hi Andy

videos are in MP4 AVC format, 1920x1080 progressive and variable framerate

Are these the original or have they been produced from an Interlaced original?

I know it's a forlorn hope but has anyone any idea what can be done?

Moire patterns are difficult. Possible solutions are:

Create a mask using the Mask Generator duplicating the video clip, stacking it so the mask is in between, add Gaussian blur to the lower clip , and add Chromakey Alpha to the mask.

The downside is this requires a high contrast between your granddaughter and the background.
If you have Neat Video then this may be able to reduce the moire by setting the the analyzing window directly over the moire area, analyse then adjust the results by tweaking the the colour channels if one is shown to be strronger than the other 2, and adjust the temporal settings.

As Geoff has mentioned a sample would help, about 10 to 15 secs of video clip would be helpful. . . . 'if the footage could be uploaded somewhere and a link to download it made available directly to users who you "know and trust"' . . . . Send this by PM not in a comment where anybody could download it.

John EB
Forum Moderator

ericlnz wrote on 9/2/2026, 11:46 PM

Are these the original or have they been produced from an Interlaced original?

To my knowledge Android phone videos are always progressive and Andy said they were taken on a Samsung Galaxy.

Unfortunately even progressive material can give this problem when you have fine sharp lines that move slightly, such as when hand holding. The image has to be redrawn frame by frame represented by pixels in fixed positions. We had no such problems in the days of film grain! It doesn't help that my Android phone experience, at the lower end of the market, is that phones love applying sharpening to make the image look nice. Great for social media but not for serious editing.

With one image that I had to deal with that had the moire problem I found an alternative to using gaussian blur and that was to reduce the contrast of the affected area. It was less noticeable than blurring but had the same effect of softening the sharp lines.

me_again wrote on 9/3/2026, 1:22 AM

@emmrecs @johnebaker @ericlnz

Greetings and thanks for the replies gentlemen.

Eric that's a good point about Galaxy phones sharpening and generally "improving" every shot, certainly on the Galaxy I had then - on my current one the effects can be turned off,

I did find a slight improvement when using Neat Video, and a vignette worked when she was stationary but when moving about and tracking her with the vignette, it didn't look good at all.

This morning I looked at New Blue Tilt Shift. It seems to work like a vignette but more smoothly somehow. Using the "Creamy Edges" preset and altering the mask and other settings as the clip progresses improved the clip greatly.

Combining that with Neat Video has given a quite pleasing result.

Thanks again for your contributions.

AndyW

ps - sending a clip was never really an option, sorry.