FILM9 - Restoration software for old films (8mm, Super8, 16mm) and video

[mammo1789]

What you are all missing is AVISynth's unique ability to analyze virtually any aspect of a video and then take action on what is found and do so within a frame, across several frames, or just on specific pixels.

Here is something I did which, to my knowledge, no one else has ever done. There is no NLE plugin, nor will there ever be an NLE plugin, that can do this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx26T6WOZ_4

The people who are taking swipes at AVISynth come off, at least to me, as being pretty ignorant of how it works and what it can actually do.

Come on John nobody is bashing avisynth we are discussing about the possibilities and alternatives. Many plugins can analyze picture and act on pixel,frame and so on it is not unique to avisynth come on .

[mammo1789]

I think, they just rant for ranting's sake and most of them don't even understand what they are talking about.

From the last ranter I understood that time is passing by and "google" is getting very hard and harder... and Vaporsynth is also preceding aviysynth in all those "google" fields...

Only God knows what that means.

Nobody is ranting but hey hoop on in. Not everyone here are English native can you speak more than your language I don't think so

The point is that many plugins in avisynth are becoming difficult to make the work with every ver and in conjunction with others plugins compatibility then there is compatibility with avisynth ver ( for example qtgmc) so yeah time is passing by and getting forward Vaporsynth is python based and python can analyze every aspect much faster Avisynth orginal not + is not even maintained anymore so you must agree that is getting old. Many plugins don't have multitreading, or are working in only one color space. I type on my mobile and don't use google translate so sorry for my language

[lollo]

AVISynth's unique ability to analyze virtually any aspect of a video and then take action on what is found and do so within a frame, across several frames, or just on specific pixels.

I have seen (and used as inspiration for some of my scripts to fix video problems) your work on dedupes and similar problematics.

Just as a mention, I have been helped by Stainless to develop an automatic procedure to find a defective field inside a video and automatically do a replacement with an interpolated frame using MVTools https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=183582


[Attachment 65226 - Click to enlarge]

I use s similar approach for videos where occasionally the even or the odd field of a capture is shifted up or down by a certain amount of pixels, because the lineTBC correction is not able to fully compensate the signal. With AviSynth is easy to find where the problem occurs and shift the specific field up or down in an semi-automatic way (the amount of shift is evaluated by a visual inspection).


[Attachment 65227 - Click to enlarge]

For Alwin: I know we are off-topic but the starter of the thread himself asked for a comparison AviSynth/NLE on my videos, so what?

[johnmeyer]

And I'm not a fan of subscription models. Perhaps later.

The subscription model makes some sense for a heavy user. My son-in-law is a fairly famous professional photographer ("famous" within photography circles) and he has a subscription to Lightroom and Photoshop. He gets to use all the new stuff as soon as it comes out, and Adobe does a pretty good job of adding new features.

However, for almost all cases, even when it is a product that I use heavily, the subscription model makes no sense because most companies lose their good programmers after the first few releases (they go on to new adventures) and the 2nd string comes in and makes trivial changes or, worse, changes things that don't need to be changed and makes the program work differently. They also break things that used to work just fine.

So you end up paying money without getting anything useful in return, over time.

The only subscription I have is Fusion 360, for designing parts for my 3D printer. Every few months I open it up only to find they have "upgraded" it and, in doing so, have changed the user interface completely. I want to get work done but instead have to spend an hour trying to re-learn the software. The last time they changed things they changed the name for the function that exports the model to the 3D slicer and they moved its location. I had to spend fifteen minutes searching forums to find people in the same predicament who finally figured out what to do.

I still use Microsoft Office 2003. I use Word and Excel almost every day and I am totally happy with this ancient version. I've seen the later versions. Word has added absolutely nothing useful, even for an advanced user like me (I've done a lot of automation with WordBasic and, later, VBA). The newer versions of Excel do have some intriguing feature, but I can emulate all of them with some VBA code, if I actually needed them, which I don't. The Office 2007 release completely changed the UI and, for me, made it totally unusable. I would gladly pay for upgrades, using the old software model, if they added something useful, but most companies do not hold up their end of the "subscription model" bargain.

[ConsumerDV]

Same here: Windows 7, Office 2003, Photoshop 6.0. There is only certain amount of functionality an application can have. Software companies figured, if artists are payed royalties every time their song is played, then software makers should be paid too. They have shifted from providing useful valuable product to forcing their service on their customers, all these hardware checkers and config validators - it is big brother world now.

P.S. I absolutely hate this forum automatically parsing product links!!! And I could not find a setting to turn this off.

[mammo1789]

The subscription model makes some sense for a heavy user. My son-in-law is a fairly famous professional photographer ("famous" within photography circles) and he has a subscription to Lightroom and Photoshop. He gets to use all the new stuff as soon as it comes out, and Adobe does a pretty good job of adding new features.

the subscription model suck and I also hate it and almost any big company is doing it now. I use Office 2010 (installed with the laptop) and have difficulty when working on Office 2019 on work ( and I consider my self heavy and experienced excel user ).

Good thing is that Adobe in my country is using "free" ( it is getting money from the government I guess ) subscription model for some organizations ( NGO and government agencies) and as former employ I got one . I can use whole package ( Premiere, Photoshop and AE is usually what I use) and I have free upgrade till 2024. For BorisFX I got coupon in a Magazine (2016) at first I didn't notice the drop-out and DV fixer plugins but when I used them (first time 2020 before the pandemic ) i got some prety impressive results. I will never in my right mind buy software that costs like small car I bought Neat Video and neat Image (for a combined price of 100$) long ago and upgraded after ver 5 for 29,99$ which is acceptable for average people.

As LS mentioned ( because this is FILM9 forum ) that "software" never was working right from the beginning and it is not fair for the author to use free libraries instead of coding itself and pack some ready software. Strangely I had more difficult time with the software than with the avisynth itself and I mentioned to the author some years back.

I rarely use vhs this days mostly using hd/4k camera and Premiere for editing

[mammo1789]

I have seen (and used as inspiration for some of my scripts to fix video problems) your work on dedupes and similar problematics.

Just as a mention, I have been helped by Stainless to develop an automatic procedure to find a defective field inside a video and automatically do a replacement with an interpolated frame using MVTools https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=183582

That looks very nice i could use one on some old recording still in lossless format If I can find it on my NAS hdd .

I got a lot of help and learnt a lot over the years from johnmeyer,jagabo,Selur,Lordsmurf and others and their advice are always welcome

[johnmeyer]

StainlessS, over in the doom9.org forum, has developed a huge number of AVISynth tools that he packages in his RTStats package. Finding a defective field is exactly what his software is designed to catch. Automatically fixing those hum bars would not have been possible without both his software and his help. Also, given this discussion about AVISynth, NLEs, and the proper tools for each job, to finish that project, I actually created a video mask, but used Vegas to apply that moving mask to the bad video because Vegas has interactive masking tools where I was able to adjust everything interactively.

[mammo1789]

I use s similar approach for videos where occasionally the even or the odd field of a capture is shifted up or down by a certain amount of pixels, because the lineTBC correction is not able to fully compensate the signal. With AviSynth is easy to find where the problem occurs and shift the specific field up or down in an semi-automatic way (the amount of shift is evaluated by a visual inspection)

I think drop out fixer is ideal for this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtTESGP1LFc sadly I am on vacation to try it out ( to tizz Alwin )

It is the version that I have before the subscription model and it is working on newer versions on premiere ( It will brag to upgrade but if ignored it will work)

[ConsumerDV]

^ That Boris FX filter is just too much work. If I need to identify a particular frame with a dropout and a position within the frame, I can do it manually, which is what I do presently.

[VoodooFX]

Nobody is ranting but hey hoop on in. Not everyone here are English native can you speak more than your language I don't think so

Your thinking couldn't be more wrong, I can ~7, and I'm not counting all similar to those, where I understand them ~50/50.

The point is that many plugins in avisynth are becoming difficult to make the work with every ver and in conjunction with others plugins compatibility then there is compatibility with avisynth ver ( for example qtgmc) so yeah time is passing by and getting forward Vaporsynth is python based and python can analyze every aspect much faster Avisynth orginal not + is not even maintained anymore so you must agree that is getting old. Many plugins don't have multitreading, or are working in only one color space. I type on my mobile and don't use google translate so sorry for my language

"python can analyze every aspect much faster Avisynth orginal not" - what proof do you have for this statement?
"is not even maintained anymore" - Last AvS+ update was a ~month ago...
"Many plugins don't have multitreading" - Solution is Prefetch() and ect.. [Btw, multithreading in Python is kinda not really multithreading...]
"Many plugins" hardly comes together with "Vaporsynth"...

Do you realize that "becoming difficult... ...compatibility" is like tenfold bigger problem for Python's stuff, ever heard about Python's dependency hell?

Conclusion: BS.

[lordsmurf]

I actually would not doubt python being able to work much faster. But the bigger issue is that nothing in python exists (not really), and nobody plans to convert Avisynth or Vapoursynth into pure python. So somewhat moot. Vapoursynth is python with C++. I see some AvsPmod stuff using python, but never tried. This has been discussed for years. Just another bitch-and-moan, or vaporware, or both.

Avisynth maintenance is complex. The filters may not get updated for years, or ever. The core files getting semi-regular updates is nice and all, but without the filters, it's a nothing engine. There's never been a single universal place for this stuff, it gets barfed all over the web, mostly because of in-fighting in the Avisynth community (some of it weird BS).

prefetch() doesn't always work. Glitches.

Vapoursynth only has a small sampling of what Avisynth does. And for those exact filters that it does share, speed isn't vastly different. I only use Vapoursynth in Hybrid, I've not seen a need to learn it manually to date.

So while I use, suggest, and support Avisynth, I'm no blind lemming. It has issues, and I've said that for 20 years now. For example, the lack of documentation has always pissed me off, too few filters have any usage info. But again, it's a tool for video tasks. Often the best or only tool.

[Gelinox]

This forum is really weird and unhealthy... no respect, the next one always knows a lot more than the previous one and is always much more intelligent. If it goes on like this the last one to speak should at least have an IQ of 180.

I remind you that this thread is dedicated to Film9, which we will stop distributing soon, please respect that.
A parenthesis was opened on the new tools to do without Avisynth, different opinions were expressed, now this parenthesis is closed and this thread remains dedicated to Film9.

Even with new version all lagarith and ut interlaced TFF files are read by the program to be progressive ( one is from camera analog and another from vhs ). Also output has limitation of 720x576 even if the VHS file is full pal 768x576. On default ( newbie settings) sharpening is too strong and maybe the interface has to be fully translated to English for better understanding. Just my thoughts not hard feelings

I had forgotten the details of this first version... it's not brand new.
The problem you encountered was due to the MediaInfo DLL not always detecting the video format correctly. This DLL was later updated.
The output format limitation was also changed in a later version.
I have not found any other interventions from you. From there to say that nothing works, it seems to me very exaggerated.

As LS mentioned because this is FILM9 forum ) that "software" never was working right from the beginning and it is not fair for the author to use free libraries instead of coding itself and pack some ready software.

The fact that Film9 uses Avisynth DLLs has never been hidden. It is mentioned in the application itself (page 1 of the user manual).
Film9 has always been free. So there is no commercial intent.
There has never been any question of using public domain DLLs for commercial software, this statement is false.
Members of this forum are getting paid for their scanning work.
Do they have a problem of conscience about getting paid by using public DLL's?
Offering the possibility for users to make a donation only if they wish, as well as for professionals to advertise themselves, does not constitute a commercial approach.

Video computers should be lean, not full of unnecessary shit. That's why.
There can also be unforeseen consequences of installing various .NET Framework versions, and they can screw up far more important function of the video system. That's why.
I don't want to fubar my stuff just to try a whizbang new tool.
After moving to a safe system, I tried this. It's mostly useless, as far as I can see. I ran into foreign-language error messages, and the whole "you must setup capture first" was really stupid. It's a halfass attempt to be all-in-one software, rather than the "film restoration" tool that it claims to be.
The ONLY thing that I was interested in trying was the NR for film noise. But I couldn't get that far.
It's rather sad when Avisynth is actually easier.

This is the only experiment done by LordSmurf... it's up to you to judge if it's an objective opinion.
Didn't you recently complain about the lack of documentation for some plugins? Why didn't you consult the Film9 manual?

More seriously, Film 9 is:
- +14'000 lines of code
- 58312 complete downloads (this morning)
- Automatic detection of the format of your clip
- The ability to set up projects (type of capture, output format, etc.)
- Call up as many clips as you want
- Set each of these clips individually
- Create as many settings presets as you want
- Apply these presets as you wish
- Automatically sequence the rendering of these clips
- Manage the matching between Avisynth, VirtualDub, user settings.

and I'm forgetting many more...

A program of this complexity requires many debugging phases. Which we did.
Maybe for some poeple Film9 never worked, that's quite possible,
Now, we are not behind every PC and every user, and it is sometimes difficult to help someone when they have a strong prejudice, when they don't want to spend time looking for their problem, when they don't give us enough information about the problems they have. But to question the reliability of this software is dishonest.

Even if Film9 is not perfect, the core is there and solid and for a totally different use than AVSPmod. With a better welcome and a younger mindset, we could have collaborated and made it even better. Unfortunately the ego of some people was a brake, not the reliability of this software.
And finally it is the end user, the one who will never write an AVS script, who pays the price.
Where is the sincere and healthy will to help behind this attitude?

I repeat, we won't develop Film9 anymore, because we think that Avisynth is not a future solution anymore and considering so much work for an aging tool is not reasonable.

And thank you for leaving this thread only for messages about Film9.

[Alwyn]

Well said, Gelinox, and again, thank you for your efforts.

[mammo1789]

Your thinking couldn't be more wrong, I can ~7, and I'm not counting all similar to those, where I understand them ~50/50.

7 ? world languages really wow tumbs up I can speak only 4 English,Spanish,Italian,Arabic,German and non of it is my native then with your logic I can speak 15 more which are similar to my mother language but those are not world languages so lets leave to that

"python can analyze every aspect much faster Avisynth orginal not" - what proof do you have for this statement?

Because python is intended for the analysis of large amounts of data: It is more reusable and not quite cumbersome for beginners it can do pretty much everything with the results of the data and it has huge "fan" base non of it has the avisynth I guess you know that. As I sad I also use avisynth and learnt over the years from the members of this and doom9 org forums. LS sad nicely and that is the same thing I was referring to and that is

Avisynth maintenance is complex. The filters may not get updated for years, or ever. The core files getting semi-regular updates is nice and all, but without the filters, it's a nothing engine. There's never been a single universal place for this stuff, it gets barfed all over the web, mostly because of in-fighting in the Avisynth community (some of it weird BS).

The idea behind using text to manipulate video was brilliant but .... And again avisynth is excellent "software" but it is getting old. Avisynth+ is fork the original is not updated with years and some plugins are ages old and very difficult to make all work and be stable.

I have not found any other interventions from you. From there to say that nothing works, it seems to me very exaggerated

I never said nothing works I just sad that it was difficult to make it work ( even more difficult than avisynth which probably was not your intent in the first place) and installing more libraries and reinstalling avisynth was pain in the ass ( which probably was also not your intention)

As I sad in the post years ago no hard feelings and appreciate your effort good luck

[bc91344]

Well said, Gelinox, and again, thank you for your efforts.

And one more vote from a very satisficed user of Film9.

[ConsumerDV]

Because python is intended for the analysis of large amounts of data

Python is not intended for the analysis of large amounts of data. It is " the Programming Language of the Agile Era". It is "a very lean programming language", "the Master Key for System Integration". Just because people use it for analyzing large amounts of data does not mean that the language was designed for this particular task.

Python is adopted widely in the film industry
Side Effects started using Python in 2005 as a replacement for their in-house scripting language. Python was chosen because they wanted a real-world, heavily used, robust language with a large set of supporting libraries. Python was also being adopted widely in the film industry and Side Effects wanted to facilitate interoperability between Houdini and other packages and libraries.

Funny that Python Foundation does not mention Vapoursynth in its brochure.

[Gelinox]

I remind you that this thread is dedicated to Film9, please respect that.
A parenthesis was opened on the new tools to do without Avisynth, different opinions were expressed, now this parenthesis is closed and this thread remains dedicated to Film9.

This request will certainly have escaped you.
Thank you in advance for respecting it.

[mammo1789]

Python is not intended for the analysis of large amounts of data. It is " the Programming Language of the Agile Era". It is "a very lean programming language", "the Master Key for System Integration". Just because people use it for analyzing large amounts of data does not mean that the language was designed for this particular task.

I agree

This request will certainly have escaped you.
Thank you in advance for respecting it.

[lordsmurf]

This forum is really weird and unhealthy... no respect,
should at least have an IQ of 180.

Ah yes, the classic "playing the victim" on one hand, and being insulting on the other. You can't have it both ways. Or even one way.

this thread remains dedicated to Film9.

That's not your call. The conversation has always been about Avisynth, because this "software" is a merely an Avisynth GUI.

Members of this forum are getting paid for their scanning work.

Most are not. And even if some are, you are making false comparisons. Software is a product, not a service.

This is the only experiment done by LordSmurf...

... as far as you know. And what you know is outdated.

Maybe for some poeple Film9 never worked, that's quite possible,

Well, thanks for finally acknowledging this. And I'm not the only one.

Now, we are not behind every PC and every user, and it is sometimes difficult to help someone when they have a strong prejudice, when they don't want to spend time looking for their problem, when they don't give us enough information about the problems they have. But to question the reliability of this software is dishonest.

The problem was always that error messages were obtuse, or it just crashed non-verbose. It's hard to report an error with you literally have nothing to report, outside of "software no worky". Worse yet, it overwrote settings for Avisynth and VirtualDub, and made a mess on systems that already had both VirtualDub and Avisynth installed. That was unacceptable, and it really pissed me off at the time (because it wasted my time).

With a better welcome and a younger mindset, we could have collaborated and made it even better.

This is on you, certainly not me. You were dismissive of errors, or never followed up on reports, or blamed the user's computers.

because we think that Avisynth is not a future solution anymore

And I still see nothing else, aside from watered-down GUI tools. Some exceptions, narrow in scope (Mercalli, it seem BorisFX, few others, not many). It'd be nice to have quality alternatives, but it's just not so right now, or probably not anytime soon. You must realize that I don't necessarily like Avisynth, but it's the tool available, to do what is needed.

Again, no malice, good luck on your future endeavors. We simply never agreed on FILM9, and that's fine.

does not mean that the language was designed

Sometimes being designed for something matters. Other times, it's a happy accident.

[GillesH]

It's very funny to see a little dwarf become passionate about a subject that does not interest him.
I remember a grumpy little dwarf. Is the same family ?

[Attachment 65287 - Click to enlarge]

But, maybe he didn't understand everything ! It's true that little dwarfs don't have the same neurons.
But, we want him to grow.
In the meantime, keep making us laugh. It is needed!

[lordsmurf]

grumpy

It reminds me of this old joke:
Two cars have a wreck, both drivers get out.
One is a little person, and says "I'm not happy!"
The other guy says "Well which one are you?"

[Gelinox]

It reminds me of this old joke:

It's true that an Avisynth user who knew a recent joke would have surprised us more.

Relax my boy, it's just a joke...

[mcconnor]

Even for a newbie it takes 5 minutes to write and run that basic/simple TemporalDegrain() + LSFmod() script in AviSynth, there is no magic there; except for people who do not want to spent that time and prefere a GUI for whatever dedicated software (ffmpeg is an example), giving up to have the full control of the processes and fine tuning. And for advanced user you have available all the power of the AviSynth filters to play with the parameters and obtain the best possible result. I aim to the best possible results, good "enough" is not good for me. Speed and frame per seconds is not my priority either.

I wouldn' bet on this. I am a newbie to Avisynth and besides some really simple tasks for me it has proven a serious challenge even to set it all up download all needed DLLs and so on. I read through various scripts (e.g. johnmeyers, videofred....) only to see that it would take me veeeery long to understand or even modify them. I think I have a good understanding what I wan't to achieve (Detail, Grain Reduction, Colorisation and all that) - I even posted results of my few works here on the forum - but without film9 I don#t think I would have made it that far as to achieve results. I tried before - and for more than 5 minutes - with AviSynth alone and failed - at least I couldnt afford spending the time required to master it. With the GUI of film9 I did get where I needed to be and even though I also harnessed tools that run in Virtualdub that would still be a GUI solution.

I definitly see that Iollo put a lot of dedication and effort into understanding, setting up and refining his work (surely much more than 5 minutes) and it really pays off in my opinion. But not everybody can invest the same amount of effort but still needs good results - for those people film9 or other NLE (with proper understanding of what to achieve) can give those results faster - Thanks for developing those Gelinox and Gilles

[lollo]

In a certain sense you are right, I probably understimated the effort when the starting point is very low. And videofred scrips, although excellent in performances, are badly written to be easily understandable, especially for the stabilization sub-routines.

But look to the following example; when you have the right and specific indications about what to do it really takes 5 minutes to download the necessary DLLs and write and run an AviSynth script of medium complexity performing deinterlacing, denoise and sharpening:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/video-capture/12805-first-video-capture.html#post85085

The choice of the right filter, the tuning of the parameters, the sequence of the operations, etc. is for sure much more difficult, and requires a lot of time and expertize. But is is true for any video postprocessing, whatever tool is used.

I never used film9, but I am sure it provided a good AviSynth solution for many. The real discussion in the last comments was between AviSynth versus a NLE.

[Gelinox]

Hello McConnor,
Thanks for your message, I'm glad Film9 was able to help you.
We understand that you are not interested in writing scripts and it is for users like you that we have created this software.
Good luck with your projects!

[Gelinox]

Hi there !

The Film9 domain name has already been taken over and this poses a security problem for Film9 users.
They risk being unknowingly redirected to malicious sites, but only if they accept an update.
This is a potential risk that does not occur at this time.

To avoid this, we made a latest version of Film9 (3.2) which no longer queries our website to see if an update is available.
It can be downloaded here:
http://web.jclaude.free.fr/Les%20fichiers/Film9/SetupFilm9.exe

Thanks to Jean-Claude for hosting it.

I take this opportunity to remind you that we no longer provide support for this software, including by PM.

Gilles and Roland

[Past Colours]

Thank you both for your contribution to the wonderful world of film and video restoration.

I can vouch for so many that I have come across that have not had the technical where with all, but have had the opportunity to utilize Film9 within their chain of film restoration processes .

Bon Voyage

Peter

[boffee]

Yes, I agree, I have used Film9 ever since the first issue with success. Thank you for your efforts in developing this software. Very much appreciated.

Boffee

[mcconnor]

By all means - thank you for this helpful software! It has helped me in preserving some dear family memories that now cheer me up ever so often...Even if it is not developed further it is still very useful as is. Thanks also for your security concern regarding the users of your software - definitely out of the ordinaray for a free software!

Had there be plans to make it open source to be further developed upon by other people? There might well be potential (enhanced (AI) upscaling, refined frame interpolation and so on... all that has been discussed in this thread...)?

Greets