Trying to clean up a PAL DVD

[TheMrDoggo69]

I'm a pretty big noob with video, so forgive any incorrect terminology here. Me and some friends are putting together a restoration for an old anime that never got a decent home release, all we've got is a bad tape master plastered onto a DVD. We're doing white balance, color correction, brightness and saturation adjustments, just trying to get it to look more presentable.

For this purpose, there are specific points where a PAL DVD released in France is the best option due to having significantly better color clarity in scenes that are ridiculously bleached and washed out in the Japanese DVD. But I can't figure out any way to fix the interlacing artifacts here, despite having looked through quite a number of forums and trying their solutions. I'm thinking this might just be unfixable on this version of the DVD-- The methods I found on here fixed some of the frames, but left most of them, so it might just be baked into the video and unfixable. Hopefully the attached file is acceptable, I just ran it through Avisynth with nothing but a trim and used the direct stream copy feature.

tl;dr: Is it possible to clean this? The Japanese DVD is easily fixed with some TFM and Decimate calls, but sometimes the French DVD, used in the attachment, would allow for better colors. Only issue is that I can't find out how to fix the artifacts.

[DB83]

Interlace artifacts are typically created when cropping/resizing is done prior to a proper de-interlace.

But this is not going to help you. One can ignore your claim to having a 'Master' since, I guess, you do not actually possess the original tape but a normal commercially released copy. But comparing even a dvd to your 'master' hardly helps. You need to upload a sample from the tape you have so that all issues are present and then those in the know may be able to assist. Unless I mis-understood you and that sample is taken from the tape and not the dvd.

[poisondeathray]

Next time just cut a m2v it with DGIndex. It will be 10x smaller in filesize, the original quality and retain mpeg2 flags

Too many field blends. Maybe 1 in 10 are semi-clean, if even that . You won't be able to improve the blends. Even if you did frame by frame with photoshop it would be difficult, because of so many blends, and the semi clean ones have compression artifacts. I would discard this one

For the other version, "washed out" is usually easy to fix, but "bleached" implies clipping - not so easy to fix. Or maybe you're not describing it correctly ?

[TheMrDoggo69]

I do not own the masters, I was saying that the release we have is a tape master pasted onto a DVD. Sorry if that caused any confusion.

When I say "washed out" and "bleached" I'm referring to the quality of the Japanese DVD causing the entire thing to be incredibly bright, and for his skin to share nearly the same sat, lum and hue values as the eyes and ring behind him, and it looks especially bad after white balance. This makes any adjustments to his skin cause intense issues to the rest of the image. Here are a couple mockups I did in a few seconds using a similar method for both, the French DVD in particularly bright scenes like this is much more workable than the Japanese DVD. If the blending is unfixable that's a shame, though this DVD is only needed for a few scenes. If necessary we do have the manpower to go frame by frame through these scenes.

[DB83]

Anime is not my subject of 'expertise' but it may well be easier to work from the Japanese DVD rather than the PAL. The PAL could even have been a quick 'n dirty conversion rather than from the original, as you put it, 'Master'. After all there is no reason why a NTSC dvd can not be played in a PAL system. But there is a potential reason for the variance in display inasmuch that Japanese IRE is different to US IRE but I guess that it can be corrected. So I suggest a sample from the original Japanese DVD as a starting point.

[poisondeathray]

Is "French 2.png" the desired end "look" , from starting point "oh no.png" ?

As long as "bright" mean no clipping in a given channel, it's 10x easier to adjust the colors than to fix the blends. You could do this in Resolve, or get 95% of the way there with just various automatic color matching plugins then fine tuning

For the blends you basically have to recreate the animation from parts of neighboring "good" fields. The problem is there aren't very many "good" fields. Maybe 1 in 10 are decent, and some of those are slightly contaminated. This is a lot of work

[Selur]

yup, getting rid of those blends is a 'no-go'.