Restoring Ghosty 60i to 24p?

[tygerbug]

Hi everyone. I do film and video restoration as a hobby. I restored The Thief and the Cobbler, an unfinished animated classic by Richard Williams (Who Framed Roger Rabbit) ... I started that project in 2006, and the most recent restoration took about two and a half years to complete, involving a ton of frame by frame work. Possibly the most complex restoration of any film ever done, though who knows -- You can watch it here.

http://www.youtube.com/user/TheThiefArchive


Lately I've been doing a lot of Muppet material from VHS. I've also just been sent a VHS of an extremely rare film from the 1970s, and been asked to clean it up as best I can.

I know I need help with this one, though. When I was restoring The Thief, I had a lot of help from Christoph Nass, who filtered the video sources, removing some ghosting, enlarging and improving the video, and getting them into 24p format. He did this in Avisynth. That's not available to me, as I'm on a Mac.

My own restoration work often involves noise reduction in After Effects, painting out damage and recreating shots in Photoshop, editing and compositing sources together in Final Cut Pro, dirt removal and so on.

A sample of my work:
https://vimeo.com/97449247

What I can't really do is unpick frame rate issues caused by a bad conversion.

I often run into sources which were originally 25p, 50i or 24p and have been badly converted to 60i, or something like that. I really need help on this, on undoing that and really getting the frame rates right. Not easy work, and Christoph's pretty busy so I can't ask him to do everything!

Here's a clip:

http://www.mediafire.com/watch/77sjyh7bfl2f158/Grass-Clip1.mpeg

I would assume that the film was originally 24p. It's 60i now, and extremely ghosty. You can see when it cuts from one shot to another, that it takes five or six frames for that transition to happen. It was probably filmed by someone off a projector screen. My source is trying to track down an actual 35mm film version, but I don't know if he'll be successful. The trailer is included on this same VHS, and is in slightly better quality, although it needs lots of manual fixes.

What I'd like ideally is for this 60i video to be converted to 24p in a way that lessens the ghosting effect somewhat, and is at least somewhat accurate to what the original frames would have been - smooth rather than jerky. This is probably best done in AviSynth, although if there's an option I could run on my own Mac I'd love to hear it.

If anyone has any ideas, you can contact me here or at gilchristgarrett at gmail . com.

[jagabo]

Normally you would use a smart bob followed by SRestore() in AviSynth with field blended PAL/NTSC conversions. But your source is much worse the the usual conversion. Either it has been through multiple PAL/NTSC NTSC/PAL conversions of someone applied a very strong temporal filter. Some fields are a blend of four different film frames. I don't think you'll find anything that will deal effectively with that.

[tygerbug]

I suspect it's a cam copy, shot off a screen. At any rate, this is the copy I've got, and I've got to make the most of it .... I'm not expecting miracles, but some sort of passable 24p would be great.

Second clip:
http://www.mediafire.com/watch/24fw1qor43mfjb4/Grass-Clip2.mpeg

[jagabo]

I'd just make it 60p. At least that won't be any worse than the source.