Hello, complete newb here.

I recently had all of my father's 1960's-1980's handheld camera movies (Super8 and Mini8) converted to digital. I used a very reputable company who did it exactly the way I wanted it, and on a telecine device. Problem is, after researching post-processing I am not sure I am on the right path.

I had them ripped @ 4K (3840x2160) H.264 into ProRes format/MP4 container, thinking that it would look best at the native res on a modern TV -- I was not anticipating doing any post-processing, initially. They do look good, but after watching nearly all the content, and after researching things like AVISynth I can definitely see some opportunities where I would love to try out some post processing to touch things up a bit.

I found Fred's (https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=144271) AVISynth script for restoring film, and I am very interested in it, however:

1) The videos have black bars on the sides. (395 pixels on the left/right); prior to post processing using Fred's script I am assuming I would need to crop these out. Fred's instructions say the video cannot have black bars on the sides, or else it won't work properly.

2) The framerate is 29.97fps according to the Windows file properties and if I step through the content frame-by-frame, frames "seem" to be duplicated. For the motion smoothing options in Fred's scripts to work, per the documentation I cannot have duplicate frames.

I have Adobe Creative Suite, VirtualDub2, AVISynth at my disposal and a pretty hefty PC / GPU in which I can utilize, but I would really like to know if I am Ok on my source files or if I should perhaps consider getting them re-captured frame-by-frame as image files, or with video different specifications? Should I consider encoding down to a lower res to make things more manageable? (preferably something that would still scale or look decent enough on a 4K or 1080p TV?)

If my source format is good, I would really prefer to only encode once, so I am curious if it's possible to

a) crop the black borders off,
b) smooth the framerate (de-dupe/decimate)
and c) run Fred's other restoration scripts, all in "one fell swoop"/encode??