Improving old movies on DVD that old question

[3doz]

With all the improvement in the indutsry and on programs in general there must be a pro program that will clean up those old movies on dvd ......I have many that were taken of vhs years back , sure they look just OK and watchable on the lod crt Tv but now with Lcd and upscaling they are crap
I also have a lot taken from TV again when the quality was exceptable , no ghosting

I tried using Tmpgenc x4 to
adjust the frame rate from 25 back to 24 , but that did not look any different

When you can see a difference in using a stand alone Sony DVD recorde on a Vhs tape after manual adjustments , they come out rather better thatn the original
So there must be a computer program that will improve the picture on a dvd movie

[minidv2dvd]

no. you would have to have the original source analog material and re-do the digital conversion. telecine machines cost millions......

[tomlee59]

Of course you can improve the output, but there's a limit to what can be done. Proper upscaling and noise removal are the highest-impact operations that tend to please the eye (but quality is in the eye of the beholder, and not all eyes behold beauty in the same way). Just don't expect to turn your 1980s-era VHS video into anything remotely competitive with Blu-Ray. VHS imposes fundamental limitations on how much information is available, so you can only go so far. You can crank up SNR with noise filtering, but at the expense of loss of edge detail. Anything derived from VHS source material will look "soft" if you do any reasonable processing.

I don't know why you're fiddling with framerates. Perhaps you could explain what you were thinking, as that might give us a clue as to what you mean by "improve."

[guns1inger]

You won't make VHS look much better than, well, VHS, and upscaled it will look awful most of the time. You are also running at a disadvantage because you have already compressed the digital version of the video by going to DVD. Best bet is to recapture from the source and process with avisynth where necessary.

However all this is moot unless you have an exceptional upscaler, as VHS doesn't upscale well most of the time anyway, and with the standard upscaler in most TVs or cheap DVD players, it will look like crap.

Honestly, if you want a good version, buy the commercial DVD. If you have VHS source and refuse to buy better, keep your CRT going so you can watch it.

[victoriabears]

I think we have to remember that some of the charm of watching old movies, is that they look old.

[guns1inger]

There is a difference between movies that look old, and badly-upscaled-from-low-quality-source movies

[AlanHK]

I was making some DVDs from very old video captures, cleaned them up a bit in Avisynth.

Ones with a lot of specks, scratches, I used this:

AVISource("1-1.avi",false)
RemoveDirt()
Sharpen(0.8)
LanczosResize(672,544,0,0,640,480)
AddBorders(24,16,24,16)

As RemoveDirt() blurs the image a bit, it's necessary to sharpen after.

Others suffered some blockiness artifacts, so I used the DeBlock Filter (at least most Avisynth filters have fairly obvious names):

AVISource("1_2.avi")
DeBlock_DeBlock(quant=25, aOffset=8, bOffset=16)
UnsharpMask(30,9, 0)
LanczosResize(672,544,0,0,640,480)
AddBorders(24,16,24,16)

A different sharpener here (there are many) which seemed to work better with these particular encodes.

AvsP is good for tweaking filter settings.

[lordsmurf]

DVDs can look better than the source VHS tape played in a consumer deck, period. I do it multiple times daily.