Kinescope help

[cbehr91]

I'm trying to restore this Kinescope off a DVD using Avisynth (this was an NTSC broadcast from 1955). I ripped the DVD using DGIndex with "Honor pulldown flags" selected, but I can try again in "Force Film" mode if experts think that would be better. Attached are unfiltered and filtered samples. I was trying a combination of Bob + SRestore, followed by QTGMC in progressive mode, ReduceFlicker, and TTempSmooth to reduce flicker and herringbone that accompanies much of the motion, followed by MosquitoNR to get rid of some slight MPEG compression noise.

[Sharc]

Something looks wrong to me with your unfiltered .avi
Upload a sample of the original .vob of the DVD.

[cbehr91]

I'm afraid I don't know how to do that without re-encoding. I don't think I can attach the entire .vob here. All I did was import the .d2v file into VirtualDub and export a lossless AVI in Fast Recompress mode.

[cbehr91]

Never mind, I figured it out using VideoReDo.

[Sharc]

Pretty bad. The original has probably been poorly blend-deinterlaced or framreate converted and then hard-telecined, or similar ....
In a first step I would probably try to IVTC it, something like

LWLibavVideoSource("kinescope help vob.vob")
tfm(pp=1).tdecimate()  #returns 23.976fps "progressive" blended frames

and continue from there with attempts for cleaning it up....

[cbehr91]

I was quite pleased with the result of this script starting with your suggestion.

tfm(PP=1).tdecimate()
QTGMC(InputType=1,TR2=3) # retained more detail and didn't smear as much as InputType=2 and 3
MosquitoNR(strength=16, restore=64, radius=2) # MPEG compression noise
ColorYUV(autogain=true,opt="coring") # boost highlights
Grayscale()

I saw no additional benefit to adding back TTempSmooth or ReduceFlicker. Apparently on this particular system of mine RemoveDirtMC doesn't work, but that's for another thread. Otherwise, I'd use that to get rid of the film dust.

[Sharc]

Good you could improve it.
For removing the ugly blends you may want to take a look at ExBlend (I didn't try though):
https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=175948

[johnmeyer]

The blends are at the field level, so doing the IVTC will simply get rid of the 3:2, but you will be left with the same problems. The original Kinescope did not look like this, so somewhere some person screwed it up. You might poke around to see if you can find a version which is from the original. Yes, that is a long shot, but if you know the name of the show, you might find something.

[cbehr91]

The blends are at the field level, so doing the IVTC will simply get rid of the 3:2, but you will be left with the same problems. The original Kinescope did not look like this, so somewhere some person screwed it up. You might poke around to see if you can find a version which is from the original. Yes, that is a long shot, but if you know the name of the show, you might find something.

It's the January 9th, 1955 episode of the show Omnibus. While it aired on CBS, the show was actually a product of the Ford Foundation, so it may not be in CBS's archives. While it would have been nice to restore the original fields, I'm fine with the pulldown removed and harsh interlacing artifacts, flicker and herringbone calmed down.

For removing the ugly blends you may want to take a look at ExBlend (I didn't try though)

I did try it followed by Vinverse and TDecimate and liked better the script that removed the pulldown followed by aggressive settings with QTGMC in progressive mode. I'm not on the system I worked on it right now, but I can provide more post-processed samples later.