I have Adobe After Effects, and it has a new paint program which can be used to "paint" out undesireable things out of the picture...I haven't tried it on my own footage yet, but using a tutorial, I did successfully eliminate a boom microphone out of the top of a test scene...so when I get some super 8 transferred to minidv, if there is any offending dirt or scratches, I'm going to try out the technique on these artifacts...may be a bit time consuming, but the results should be good! It will be a few months before I get the film transferred, but I'll let you know how it went! MikeyB