WW II short documentary restoration

[georgee]

Hello WW II movie fans,

I recently found on Youtube and on other privately held websites or blogs, some very interesting and historically very valuable black and white footage, made around 1939-1944, by an unknown German camera operator.

All these movies, 2 to 5 minutes in length, show Nazi destruction of major cities in Europe: Warsaw, Berlin, Vienna... These documentaries are of different quality but most of them have one common problem: lack of sharpness: people, vehicules, threes, buildings - they all have their contours washed out, blending with the backgrounds.

I wonder if there is a computer program, maybe like Adobe Premier Pro CS or any other software on the market , that could significantly improve sharpness, if not to the full 1080p quality, at least to a decent 720p.If yes, how should I proceed? Any information in that matter would be greatly appreciated. Thank you,

George

[Nelson37]

First step would be to get as close to the original source file as possible. Might be worth some research to find the best digital copies available.

After that, there is really not a whole lot that can be done with much of the older stuff without loosing too much detail.

Just saw some rare stuff the other day, US planes in Soviet markings, in a completely unrelated documentary

[olyteddy]

A good place to look for those kinds of videos is archive.org ...

[poisondeathray]

From your description it's unlikely that much can be done to salvage it. However, if it's just a levels issue, from "contours washed out", not a low quality, low birate issue, then something might be able to be done

Premiere Pro isn't restoration software - it's editing software. It has nothing specialized for this sort of thing

If your "source" is already very poor at SD, there is not much you can do to upscale it. Even the best upscaling algorithms on perfect SD sources only reduce aliasing, they don't add any more detail than is already present

If you post the youtube URL, a sample or , a screenshot, then we can give you an idea of what could be done, but the answer will probably be nothing

[lordsmurf]

Please link to those Youtube videos. I am interested in seeing them.