Restore 80s VHS capture of film home movies

[armyofquad]

I received a box of VHS tapes to convert for a family member. One of the tapes are of old film home movies, status of the original films unknown, but thought to be likely lost or gone. Sad, I know.

Reviewing the VHS capture, it appears to be a typical 80s VHS capture of material projected at 20fps. Which means deinterlacing the capture to 59.940, I'm seeing a typical duplication of 3 frames, but not perfect, with some blended frames.

My thought is that ideally, I'd want to run it through a process to get it back down to 20fps with a process that will filter out duplicate and blended frames, and then slow it down to it's intended 18fps. Consulting with co-pilot, I dabbled around some with tdecimate, but it seems to still result in frequent blended frames being picked.

What's the normal process in this scenario? Keep it at 60p and live with the blends and duplicates? Or is there a process to fine tune filters to eliminate most of the blended and duplicate frames?

Sample for those that want to take a closer look.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/2cfm3fsxk97sdtxa65fhz/sample.avi?rlkey=od50weychtvlkd4lq9toajkb3&dl=0

[Sharc]

I didn't check your clip, but I went through this rabbit hole a while ago. Here my basic restoration steps (sometimes recursive), all done in Avisynth:
- restore the original "clean" frames by applying some deblending process (try Srestore for example)
- find and remove the duplicates and bad frames (try Dedup, plus some manual work to reduce false positives and remaining dupes)
- fill temporal gaps with motion interpolated frames
- (perhaps add a final motion interpolation run to iron out remaining jerkiness)
- adjust (resample) the audio and remultiplex

Restoring the 15 minutes clip kept me busy for a week. It was not exactly constant 18fps because the film camera was clockwork driven with slight fps fluctuations around the nominal 18fps, plus the VHS was post edited to add some artwork .......
I hope your case is simpler - and just forget AI.