Trying to improve movie recorded from OTA to VHS then transfered to DVD

[3d1l]

Hi everyone,

I’m attempting to improve the visual quality of a film that the only copy I could get came from a PAL VHS recording of an standard definition OTA transmission from a RAI broadcast (Italian TV channel), later transferred to DVD. Many years ago I received it from a contact from Italy, but couldn’t play it at the time due to the PAL/NTSC mismatch.

Recently, I extracted the DVD’s VOBs directly to MKV (no recompression) and ran it through HandBrake. As expected, quality was poor (for today standards), SD, analog noise, compression artifacts. I then tried AVSynth+ but still no perceptible improvement.

Motivated by the impressive online restorations I’ve seen of even worse looking material, I decided not to quit and spent weeks configuring a VapourSynth enviroment with all the plugins and filters and building a pipeline. Despite all that, the result is only slightly better. The improvement is so minimal it’s almost imperceptible. The footage still looks soft and degraded, even after all processing.

Here’s the core of what I’m doing:

Deinterlacing with QTGMC

Antialiasing with vsTAAmbk

RGB conversion and upscale with Real-ESRGAN

Color tweaks + neo_f3kdb for debanding

My questions:

Is this kind of minimal improvement expected from such a degraded source?

Am I missing a crucial step in the chain?

Can anything else be done to improve the visual quality, or is this the hard limit?

Any guidance or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[lollo]

... a film that the only copy I could get came from a PAL VHS recording of an standard definition OTA transmission from a RAI broadcast
...
Deinterlacing with QTGMC

I suspect then that deinterlacing is not needed, because PAL movies are generally Progressive segmented Frame (even and odd fields are from the same moment in time).

For all the rest, you should post a sample of the video (I suspect upscaling won't improve anything as well).

[Selur]

I agree, a sample is needed to assess whether the file can be improved,.. (upscaling a messed up source will only lead to an even more messed out upscaled version,..)

[Alwyn]

Make a 60 second VOB snippet with AVIDemux. Use the MPEG PS output format option.

[cholla]

Make a 60 second VOB snippet with AVIDemux

To make it clear this would be a snippet from one of the .VOBs on the DVD or a .VOB copied from the DVD.
Not the .MKV .

With enough "action" video to work with.
I only post this so it is not a snippet of opening credits.
Which may be what is at the start of the video.

[Alwyn]

To make it clear this would be a snippet from one of the .VOBs on the DVD or a .VOB copied from the DVD.
Not the .MKV .

My understanding is it shouldn't make any difference because the MKV is just the combined VOBs wrapped in the MKV container.

[cholla]

To make it clear this would be a snippet from one of the .VOBs on the DVD or a .VOB copied from the DVD.
Not the .MKV .

My understanding is it shouldn't make any difference because the MKV is just the combined VOBs wrapped in the MKV container.

I'm not sure if it would make a difference.
I will have to search how to put the .vobs directly from a DVD into a .mkv.
I don't believe I have ever done that.
If I have I was unaware of it.

[Selur]

if it's an unencrypted DVD using mkvtoolnix should work

[Alwyn]

I will have to search how to put the .vobs directly from a DVD into a .mkv.

Use MakeMKV.

To clarify, all we're after is a snippet of the video that needs restoring, which is obviously MPEG 2; whether part of one of the VOBs or part of the ripped MPEG 2 video in the MakeMKV MKV, doesn't matter.

[cholla]

if it's an unencrypted DVD using mkvtoolnix should work

I do not know if the OPs DVD was encrypted or not.
A Google search has several recommendations for MakeMKV.
They say MakeMKV does this.
I have used MakeMKV many times.
I just did not realize it was a direct copy.

I may give mkvtoolnix a try just to see what it does.