Tips on Restoring WWII Color Footage

[skunkertx]

Hey folks,
I have some old World War II color guncam footage that was transfered directly from 16mm film to MiniDV. I brought the footage into Premiere and I am trying to restore the film as much as possible. I'm trying to work with levels and remove the haze or washed out look. See attachment for what it looks like straight from the tape.

Does anyone have any tips on the best filters or plugins to use for Premiere 1.5 and how I can restore some of this stuff? I know how I would do it in Photoshop, but I'm not sure if it's pretty much the same thing with the levels tool in Premiere? I tried it and it's not the same.

[Wile_E]

Was the 16mm film projected on screen and just captured to MiniDV? If so that is not the best way to capture it. Better to take it to a place that specializes in 16mm transfers.

But here is some Virtualdub filters that may help.
http://compression.ru/video/color_enhancement/old_color_en.html
http://compression.ru/video/color_enhancement/index_en.html

[JohnnyMalaria]

You can do quite a bit with our Enosoft DV Processor.

I took your sample and created a 20 second DV AVI (with Windows Movie Maker ) and then fed that into our software. I fiddled about with the Proc Amp for a bit. Here's what I got:



The settings I used are:



On a 1.5GHz Pentium M laptop, it took about 11 seconds to process the 20 second clip.

[gastorgrab]

I took your sample and created a 20 second DV

What sample? I don't see a link.

:/
.

[redwudz]

The way I do it is take the JPEG that was posted and open it in WMM as a picture. Then paste it into the time line as many times as you like to get the length you want. Then save it out as a DV file.

[anonjon]

You can do quite a bit with our Enosoft DV Processor.

I took your sample and created a 20 second DV AVI (with Windows Movie Maker ) and then fed that into our software. I fiddled about with the Proc Amp for a bit. Here's what I got:



The settings I used are:



On a 1.5GHz Pentium M laptop, it took about 11 seconds to process the 20 second clip.

That's quite impressive.

Here is a link to a business I'd use if I wanted to transfer some film: http://www.posthouse.com/

[JohnnyMalaria]

The way I do it is take the JPEG that was posted and open it in WMM as a picture. Then paste it into the time line as many times as you like to get the length you want. Then save it out as a DV file.

That's pretty much what I did

Only difference was I set the default still image length to be 20 seconds under Tools/Options.

[thecoalman]

IMO when restoring video or images, less is more . I did this in an image editor but you can do the same with a video editor, I lowered the brightness and upped the contrast. then I ran it though Neat Image to clean up some of the noise, there's also a version for video.

[Soopafresh]

Post a ten second clip somewhere.

You might also be able to address some of this noise



1.jpg

[JohnnyMalaria]

IMO when restoring video or images, less is more . I did this in an image editor but you can do the same with a video editor, I lowered the brightness and upped the contrast.

Agreed. My above quick-look-see was done on my laptop. Looking at it on my main system with a CRT monitor, I can see I whacked up the chroma too high (as I suspected). I got similar results to yours by increasing the contrast and lowering the brightness, too (no individual chroma adjustment).