Restoring FMV from a video game...!

[S0L]

Hello,

Long time reader, first time poster, and I hope this is the right place to ask about this kind of thing :P

Little bit of background, I've worked in the games business for a fair few years now, and way back around 1998, I worked (as a tester!) on a game called Hardwar. Basically it was when CD-ROM's were starting to become the norm for PC games, and as such, was one of the earlier games to use FMV.

There is some more detailed background here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardwar_(video_game)

Anyway, I'm here as this is VideoHelp - not VideoGameHelp :P

When Gremlin shut down in 2003, I'd rose to be slightly further up the food chain as one of the Production mob. One of the things we'd looked at and got as far as doing a test build, was a DVD version with remastered video. In fact I have one of the sole surviving copies...

The catch was that when we came to remaster the video all of the source BETA-Cam tapes had vanished, along with any unedited digital source... The only assets we had were the versions compressed into our in-house proprietary format, known as GDV (or Gremlin Digital Video).

At the time the folks who looked after that sort of thing, managed to extract the frames from the GDV, load them into Sonic Foundry Vegas 3 and then attempt to work around the weird compression artifacts that GDV introduced to the footage.

Here is a before and after shot of similar frames to give you an idea...

Original GDV Frame -



And a shot from the DVD 'remaster'



Now... a few years have passed, and in that time I've learned my way through a few NLE's and dabbled with AviSynth, VirtualDub and more. The other day I discovered that much to my surprise there is a small but dedicated community who still play the game. Indeed they've been patching in new stuff and are even looking to do a remake. Not bad for a 13 year old game!

Given I'd been reading this forum a lot, as I'd been playing around with NeatVideo, I wondered if I could do a much better job with current tech and software, than we could way back in 2003...

Which is why I'm here!

A few technical notes then... The framerate is 12fps for a start. On my tests I've doubled this to 24, but without any interpolation, it's still entirely watchable, but yes, I will never expect it to be super smooth. The raw GDV frames are 320x200, my plan is to upscale this, currently I've simply doubled them to 640x400 in my meddlings. I never expect it to magically look DVD quality - I know the limitations of garbage in, garbage out, but I'm sure it can look better than my initial attempts.

I've had a stab at it myself by converted the raw frames into an AVI, loading this in Vegas Movie Studio 11 and playing around with it. Like so...



I don't profress to be an expert at NeatVideo, in fact I've probably gone too far with the noise reduction. Other things I've tried to help it look better is to use the Vegas Restore Blacks plugin, and I've then added some slight noise to simulate some film grain, just in an effort to smooth the overall look out a little.

I'm hoping there might be a way of fixing it up slightly better via an AviSynth script, but I'll be frank, I've no idea where I'd start...!

In the long term, if I can get it looking better, I plan to remaster the DVD version I've got and let the folks in the community have it to play. With Gremlin gone, the original development studio who produced it also gone, and some huge doubt on who if anyone owes the IP, I doubt I'll get many complaints.

I've seen it's the fashion in these parts to provide a sample, so I've packed up the first 500 raw frames as JPEG's and attached them, I'll warn you now of the horror they contain, some things I haven't mentioned is some weird cuts and static effects...!

So...

Any tips?

(other than stop rambling on!)

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S0L
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[jmac698]

Not too hard, see http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?goto=newpost&t=163014

[sanlyn]

NeatVideo's a great tool. Can't fix everything, but can do a lot of work. Take care not to use it at full power, it can wreck a video easily if untweaked. The caps look good. Remember to take it easy on the "y" channel (high-frequency=fine detail) settings and the sharpener.

[S0L]

Thanks for the tips

I'm amazed at some of the linked threads results though, I thought I was working with shonky quality video but the results of one of those threads is incredible, especially this one here:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=808013#post808013

I'd have never believed something that good coul be achieved, shame the linked video has died as I'd love to see what it looks like in motion...!

I'll have a crack at some of the techniques, see how it goes and report back :P

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S0L
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[2Bdecided]

Thanks for the tips

I'm amazed at some of the linked threads results though, I thought I was working with shonky quality video but the results of one of those threads is incredible, especially this one here:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=808013#post808013

It's not fake, it certainly works as shown.

The problem with that script is that it falls apart with fast motion and scene changes. Any time the motion estimation can't track an object, you get really obvious artefacts. Also IME it wipes out small but real details. Oh, and it re-defines "slow"!

There are those newer scripts though.

Cheers,
David.