Minimising/Removing Cine Film Flicker

[Alwyn]

I have some video from a cine film transfer that has rhythmic flickering or strobing caused by, I assume, the different frame rates between the film and the video camera. I don't have access to a variable-rate projector.

I have had a play with Donald Graft's and MSU's Deflicker filter in VDub but have had virtually no success. I also applied Neat Video, which reduced but didn't eliminate the flickering.

Being a novice-novice at AviSynth, which I suspect could help me, can someone point me in the right direction to fix this flickering?

Here's a representative clip:

[johnmeyer]

First, the best thing to do is to re-transfer the film using a proper frame-accurate transfer system where one frame of film gets transferred to one frame of video without duplicates or blends.

Second, if you are going to proceed with this capture without re-transferring, before you do anything you need to use IVTC (inverse telecine) to remove as many blended and duplicated fields as possible (operate on fields, not frames).

Third, there is an AVISynth script which purports to fix this type of transfer:

The power of Avisynth: salvaging "botched" transfers of old 8mm films to DVD

It will certainly help, and if you don't get rid of all the flicker you can use Deflicker and also add "DCT=1" to any MVTools2 noise reduction, because it too also reduces flicker. To use this script you must first use inverse telecine.

It is possible to get frame accurate results from an unsynchronized projector. It is how I built my 16mm transfer system. It requires a lot of software to eliminate the pulldown field and duplicate fields, but the result can be virtually perfect, without flicker. However, it works best if you remove the shutter, or else you have to use manual exposure. Otherwise you will get residual flicker when the camera's auto-exposure attempts to compensate for the brief total black during the time the projector shutter is closed while the film advances to the next frame.

Finally, getting back to my opening comment: this is an unusually bad transfer which has many, many other problems besides the flicker. You can get a fantastic additional amount of detail if you have it transferred properly.

[Alwyn]

Thanks John, I'll get to it. I can't retransfer, so I'll dive into Fpp's tute. Hopefully I don't hit my head on the bottom!

[Alwyn]

Thought I'd try Neat Video first (again), and found a frame flicker setting. Here it is set to Max (VDub IVTC default then Muksun Deinterlace then Neat); not bad: