How do you repair text?

[takearushfan]

Hi all,
There are countless films that have moments where text is displayed but you can't really make it out since it's been deteriorated over the years through multiple generations. Is there a way to repair "damaged" text? I'm sure there is, but I don't know what the process is called or how it's done. Do you somehow just work frame by frame? What's the best way to approach this?
Thanks,
Justin

[guns1inger]

Example ? Are we talking subtitles, or an over the shoulder shot of a letter or sign ?

Honestly, it would be frame by frame recreation and clean up, and it won't look natural in most cases.

[takearushfan]

It's one of those TV trailers where it mentions at the bottom of the screen that you're viewing actual audience reactions in a theater. I want to fix it.

[guns1inger]

Post a screen shot or sample clip. It depends what sort of damage it is. It might be simpler just to put a new text overlay on top of the old.

[takearushfan]

Hm. It never occurred to me that a new text overlay is a potential solution. I was stuck in the frame of mind of manually touching up each and every pixel, which will drive one mad
I attached two images. The first is the original resolution. The second is the blown up size, which is the one I want to work on. See, the original clip was 320x240 and I'm not satisfied with that. So, I changed the video to 512x384. Unfortunately, that results in data loss... making it look even worse/harder to fix.

[sphinx99]

Considering the low resolution, that actually looks pretty good.

[takearushfan]

Well, keep in mind that I took a single screenshot. The way it looks while it's rolling is a bit different. Plus, I wanted to fix the blown up version, not the original.

[SatStorm]

Temporal smoother gonna help the subtitles. But the picture will suffer.

Neatvideo also can help (if you set a 5-frame process)

[poisondeathray]

I think you're going about this the wrong way, or there could be some improvements in your workflow.

An overlay will work, but it will obscure everything behind in that overlay box, and should be used as a last resort IMO (ie. you don't have a better source, or no other options)

You should seek out the best (as possible) source first, then work with that.

It's obvious in your blowup sample that the pixellation and compression losses - I am going to guess it's been compressed several generations needlessly and/or the filters and compression that you are using aren't ideal.

I blew this up 2x from a crappy youtube sample, no cleanup , cropping or other filtering except for NNEDI2 for the upscaling

Note there's probably better quality trailer material out there (youtube is probably the lowest), and you would get even better results (or if you email the poster, try to get the source material or whatever they uploaded to get 1 generation better).

Your blowup


Youtube , upscaled with avisynth + NNEDI2