How do you repair old crappy video?

[kevinp]

Ever see on the TV cop shows how they can take a security camera video, zoom in on a vehicle three blocks away and "enhance" the license plate so they can read it?

We all know programs that can do that don't really exist, but I'm wondering if there's some kind of miracle program that can restore old video. In particular, I have a bunch of old cartoons that I downloaded from somewhere. Some of them make your eyes hurt they are so bad. Standard noise filters won't clean these up.

I've tried searching this forum and Google for any info, but don't really know what I'm searching for. Can anyone clue me in?

[redwudz]

If the video data is missing, there's really nothing you can do to replace it. Virtualdub or Virtualdubmod have as good of filters as any program around. You can try and filter it a few dozen ways and it's really the best that can be done. You can make the video cleaner, correct color, but you can't improve the resolution.

[lordsmurf]

Check www.lordsmurf.com by this weekend. I'll have a load of my video restoration guides up finally (though some will be beta version still).