Pace of improvement in restoration tools/technologies (post-capture)

[sphinx99]

As you know from my other post, I finished the capture phase and am now moving to the "restoration and packaging" phase. I skipped ahead to packaging, evaluating everything from DV decoders to various encoders, colorspace conversion issues, and more and can only (sadly) conclude that the tools and technologies here are some distance still from the finish line. There are issues on doom9 about DV decoders not even decoding DV properly on PCs... all sorts of various colorspace conversion and management bugs... constantly changing codecs and codec configuration practices... so I'm thinking maybe it's better to just leave things in dv and lagarith until this space matures a bit.

On the restoration side, is it a similar phenomenon? Are the tools rapidly improving, or have they stabilized as far as what they are capable of doing? By restoration I'm talking about all the basics on the PC side: noise reduction, color curve and luma level adjustment (esp. automated adjustment), sharpening, glitch/streak removal, etc. It seems to me that noise reduction is starting to reach the "good enough" point but there's still enormous room for improvement for the rest.

I'd be curious to hear others' thoughts.

[Soopafresh]

Hard to say, since so much of the final product is based on your own subjective perception. For regular SD sized DV, I do agree. The stuff doesn't take well to deinterlacing/denoising. HDV on the other hand, can look pretty amazing.

The restoration tools out there are improving, and always WILL be in a state of improvement. The "big" technology that seems to be the current darling is Motion Compensated Denoising. Apps like NeatVideo for VirtualDub employ this technique. Same with the Avisynth plugins - almost all of them look even better when used with Motion Compensation. See the MVtools plugin in Avisynth for more info.

In the "free" world, very few apps can match the power of Avisynth, although many complain about the initial learning curve. But if you go through the pain, the results are hard to beat, even with the $5000 commercial offerings.

And speaking of which - if you have the dough, you can do some incredible restoration. Look at Lowry Digital who restored the 1969 THX-1138 and recently the entire Bond series. All it takes is a farm of 300 workstations working on one frame at a time. If you want to see current state of the art, get the new re-release of the DVD. I couldn't believe it. Perfect.