Color moire/flickering in PAL footage

[voyagerhelp]

Hey all! I'm transferring my PAL DVD's of Star Trek Voyager to digital files (also using AI to enhance to HD). For the first season of the show, all the episodes have an annoying color moire/flickering that happens randomly in highlights. It's horrible lines of colors that flicker and draws your attention. I've attached two images below to show this (but it's hard to show the exact issue with just a still image). In the cave shot, you can see the unwanted colors in all the highlights of the caves. In the second photo, the unwanted color is in her eye highlights (and this color flickers to different hues every frame).

First of all, does anyone know the technical name for this issue? I've had a hard time researching it since I don't know the technical term for this colored flickering. And secondly, does anyone know how to get rid of it? Or tone it down?

I tried deinterlacing with Handbrake. And while this fixed all the normal combing issues, it did not fix the color moire/flickering. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[jagabo]

The first image has rainbow artifacts. They occur when high frequencies in the luma channel of a composite signal cross into the chroma.

Typically, the PAL releases of NTSC shows like that are just the NTSC video passed through an NTSC-to-PAL scan converter. They don't have more resolution than the NTSC DVDs and are full of field blending. You'd probably be be better off starting with the NTSC DVDs.

[voyagerhelp]

Thanks for your help jagabo. From research I did online, it appears that the NTSC DVDs have the same rainbow artifacts in the first season. These artifacts disappear in season 2 for both PAL and NTSC, so I assume the artifacts are due to issues with how they produced the first season of the show.

Any advice how to tone them down with post processing? Any good filters or plugins that are made for this? Thanks!

[TimA-C]

Er . . . if they're on DVD . . . aren't they already digital files . . . ? Just play them on a device that will deinterlace and do a decent job of upscaling, save yourself a load of time, hassle and disappointment.

[jagabo]

There are several de-rainbow filters for AviSynth: http://avisynth.nl/index.php/Category:Rainbow_%26_Dot_Crawl_Removal

[voyagerhelp]

Thank you very much! I’ll give these a look-over