Looking for tips to improve my restoration workflow

[philvideofilm]

Hello all,

I will soon launch a website dedicated to restoring videos and photos from the 90's and even though I've been experimenting with QTGMC for a long while now I'd like to up my game. Here's the current workflow:

1: Make a single VOB file with FixVTS
2: Import that file into Vegas Magix
3: There I do editing, colour grading, denoise (with Neat Video), crop, etc.
4: I Frameserve out of Vegas
5: I open the AvsPmod and tweak the script(s) if necessary
6: Render out
7: Merge the audio track with MKV Toolnix

And voilà, now I have a 1440x1080 file, deinterlaced, and with the proper ratio

I've looked into VapourSynth, but it is too script-heavy for me at the moment. That being said, are there any tools out there that would make a better job or streamline the workflow even more?

[johnmeyer]

Are you restoring commercial DVDs? You are using VOBs, so those obviously come from DVDs. You are better off using a tool that gets rid of the VOB structure and gives you an MPEG-2 file. Vegas often has audio timing problems with VOBs (although I haven't upgraded Vegas in years, so maybe they fixed that).

Do NOT use QTGMC if the original source material was shot on film. You will need to determine if it was encoded with pulldown, in which case you have to use inverse telecine, not deinterlacing. If the DVD just uses a pulldown flag and you can recover the original film frame rate, edit a 23.976, and encode a progressive file at that speed.

Upscaling is a waste of time and disk space. It will not make your video look any better.

There are many fans of Neat video, but I am not one of them. Most of the results people post show a shocking loss of detail, all in the name of removing a little bit of noise. Keep the noise so you can keep the detail.

[philvideofilm]

Thank you John for your input. A few questions if I may.

Are you restoring commercial DVDs? You are using VOBs, so those obviously come from DVDs. You are better off using a tool that gets rid of the VOB structure and gives you an MPEG-2 file.

Which program can do that?

Do NOT use QTGMC if the original source material was shot on film.

I will keep your suggestion in mind when I'll deal with film, but for now, all the sources were shot on video. Should I continue to use QTGMC then or do you have a better suggestion?

Upscaling is a waste of time and disk space. It will not make your video look any better.

I disagree, I've had pretty good results so far. Granted the sources were pristine. Upscaling is done on a case by case basis

There are many fans of Neat video, but I am not one of them. Most of the results people post show a shocking loss of detail, all in the name of removing a little bit of noise. Keep the noise so you can keep the detail.

Which denoiser do you favour? Mind you, the sources I deal with are quite noisy.

[johnmeyer]

Womble's products and VideoRedo. Here's a list: https://www.videohelp.com/software/sections/video-editors-mpg-dvd

Most of these can take VOB and convert to MPEG-2

You may think you are dealing with video, but many TV shows other than soap operas and sitcoms, and pretty much all movies were shot on film, or at least shot at 24 fps. Make sure you really know what you're dealing with.

Pretty much any AVISynth temporal desnoiser produces better results than Neat. The doom9.org forum provides lots of tests. MDegrain and KNLMeans are two AVISynth denoisers that I use.
What improvements do you think you see when you upscale? Lots of testing by many people proves there is no increase in detail. Post your results, if you disagree.

[lollo]

I disagree, I've had pretty good results so far. Granted the sources were pristine.

The approach to upscaling is the same as for deinterlacing. Your Monitor/TV will upscale (and deinterlace), when you feed it with a low resolution (interlaced) video.
The question is who is doing a better job for upscaling (deinterlacing), the Monitor/TV or the software (Avisynth/VapourSynth)?

If the choice is the last, QTGMC is the best deinterlacer, while for upscaling you can consider nnedi3_rpow2 to make it simple, or several VapourSynth plugin like ESRGAN, VSGAN, SwinIR, https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1956950#post1956950, TecoGAN https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/399360-so-where-s-all-the-Topaz-Video-Enhance-AI-d...e5#post2621546, etc...

For AviSynth denoiser, also consider TemporalDegrain2 for grainy sources and MCTemporalDenoise.

[philvideofilm]

Thank John, I got those plugins and looking forward to testing them. Turns out I had VOBMerge on my system and can use it to create an MPEG-2 clip.

Lollo: Thanks for the info as well.

Since you specialize in VHS restoration, may I ask which filters are better at improving the common noises and artifacts commonly found in VHS transfers as that is what I'm about to run into shortly?

*****

Is there any dehaloing script/plugins that work on interlaced input? The ones I found on the Avisynth wiki all work on progressive input. Because my workflow is to frameserve out of Vegas the input is still interlaced, I would assume, which means I can't use any of those.

As well, what is the general consensus for plugins order in the script?

[manono]

The ones I found on the Avisynth wiki all work on progressive input. Because my workflow is to frameserve out of Vegas the input is still interlaced, I would assume, which means I can't use any of those.

You can bob it to make it progressive, filter it and then reinterlace it.

But, as johnmeyer mentioned, you have to be able to tell truly interlaced material as opposed to something only encoded as interlaced, or something hard telecined. Also like johnmeyer, I think Neat Video is awful.

[lollo]

Is there any dehaloing script/plugins that work on interlaced input? The ones I found on the Avisynth wiki all work on progressive input. Because my workflow is to frameserve out of Vegas the input is still interlaced, I would assume, which means I can't use any of those.

As manono properly said, if for whatever reason you wish to keep the output interlaced, you can lossless deinterlace, denoise and then interlace back. For example

AssumeTFF()
QTGMC(lossless=1)
TemporalDegrain2(degrainTR=3)
AssumeTFF().SeparateFields().SelectEvery(4,0,3).Weave()

because the best AviSynth/VapourSynth filter are designed for progressive material and working on separate fields is less effective.

may I ask which filters are better at improving the common noises and artifacts commonly found in VHS transfers

There is not a general filtering flow for a captured video, it really depends on the source. I generally tend to minimize the processing, so for a "good" capture a generic denoise with TemporalDegrain2 and a light sharpening with LSFMod is enough, together with a deinterlacing if needed. Specific problems in the captures require specific filters, in the forum you can find many solutions to many different problems.

About upcaling, there is an interesting discussion running just now in this thread https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/406860-Is-it-actually-possible-to-upscale-480p-to-...sembling-1080p, where Selur and s-mp are providing excellent hints.

[johnmeyer]

I used to proudly post my scripts for restoring VHS. They do handle interlaced material correctly and are designed to output interlaced (I am not a fan of deinterlacing, unless it is required for some other reason). However, those scripts were based on some pretty old plugins and MVTools2 denoising. I suspect there are better tools out there now, and you should poke around here and over at doom9.org to see what it more current.