can snowy look (from grain?) be fixed?

[spiritgumm]

Have a PAL dvd video which I'd like to convert to mkv as well as ntsc dvd. However it has a snowy look which sometimes flickers distractingly. Looks worse after converting to anything. Looks dark enough on a monitor, but is noticeable on an HD TV (thru blu-ray player hdmi) unless I switch the hardware to Movie or Cinema mode; on the TV, this turns off the backlight and lowers Picture and Sharpness.
Using Avisynth, I originally tried to correct the levels with smoothtweak(6,1,0,0). I read that the contrast might be too high and lowered it to smoothtweak(6,.8,0,0) but that didnt really help.
Also noticed the picture looks alittle too tall when previewing in AvsP, and in the MKV I made until I manually changed the MKV aspect to 4:3 afterwards with mkvtoolnix.

[ndjamena]

PAL???

720 x 480 at 23.976fps is definitely NTSC.

Is this m2v from a failed attempt to make an NTSC DVD or is it the original source?

[spiritgumm]

sorry, I uploaded a clip from the Ntsc I made. I've replaced it with the original pal dvd. Both have the grain-flicker-whatever issue (probably worse on the ntsc). As already mentioned, it's not noticeable on a PC monitor, which is why I made MKV and dvd conversions without initially correcting for it.

[ndjamena]

MPEG2SOURCE("D:\Ins\source\grainy.demuxed.d2v")
converttoyv12(interlaced=false)
GreyScale()
ColorYUV(off_y=-16)
ColorYUV(gamma_y=50)
ColorYUV(gain_y=60, off_y=-4)
NNEDI3_Resize16(720, 480, 11, 2, -10, -2)
FFT3DFilter(bt=3, sigma=4, bh=64, bw=64, oh=32, ow=32)
LSFMod()

I'm drawing a blank as to what the actual goal is here.

[spiritgumm]

if you dont know what the problem is, what does your script do?

[ndjamena]

It resizes it, denoises it, then sharpens it.

Maybe someone else on the forum sees something else there, but all I'm seeing from the sample you gave is crumby old film footage, and that's what it's supposed to look like.

Did you have to give us several seconds of black?

-edit- Maybe a better sample would help.

[spiritgumm]

yeah, I'll wait for someone else to check it out.
The point of the black at the start was the grainy flicker is very noticeable there, and as I've repeatedly said, this is mainly noticeable on TV, not on a monitor.

[jagabo]

I did this:

Mpeg2Source("grainy.d2v", CPU2="ooooxx", Info=3) 
Crop(8,0,-8,-0)

# levels adjustments
ColorYUV(off_y=-16)
ColorYUV(gamma_y=50)
ColorYUV(gain_y=60, off_y=-4)

BicubicResize(width,480) # NTSC frame size
AssumeFPS(24000,1001) # NTSC frame rate
McTemporalDenoise(settings="medium") # easy noise reduction
GreyScale() # pure greys

This is not a great clip on which to base levels. I'd want to see more before deciding on final values. I used McTemporalDenoise() because it's easy to select a preset. You can also adjust individual settings if you want. But it's very slow.

Any time you use strong filters to remove film grain you risc losing some details and creating posterization artifacts.

[smrpix]

yeah, I'll wait for someone else to check it out.
The point of the black at the start was the grainy flicker is very noticeable there, and as I've repeatedly said, this is mainly noticeable on TV, not on a monitor.

The black at the start is helpful in that is shows dust speckles, so we know it's film. The grain may be film grain, or it may be a noisy transfer. You may want to include a good quality scene from the show as well. The shots you've chosen, an optical effect over questionably exposed footage tend towards noisiness and reduced contrast normally.

Is your source a recent DVD?

[jagabo]

If your going to remove grain you might as well remove spots too:

Mpeg2Source("grainy.d2v", CPU2="ooooxx", Info=3) 
Crop(8,0,-8,-0)

# levels adjustments
ColorYUV(off_y=-16)
ColorYUV(gamma_y=50)
ColorYUV(gain_y=60, off_y=-4)

BicubicResize(width,480) # NTSC frame size
AssumeFPS(24000,1001) # NTSC frame rate
RemoveDirtMC(30, false) # remove spots
McTemporalDenoise(settings="medium") # easy noise reduction
GreyScale() # pure greys

See this post for RemoveDirtMC(): https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/365089-8mm-Film-Restoration?p=2372066&viewfull=1#post2372066

[spiritgumm]

jagabo, I wasnt necessarily trying to remove grain; just wanted to fix the TV-visible flicker. The denoiser seems to soften the image quite abit (although the text credits looked okay). Is there a way to mitigate that?

Fyi, my original script was:
Assumefps(23.976,true)
crop(10,0,-8,-2) #for MKV
#Spline36resize(720,480) #for dvd conversion
smoothtweak(6,1,0,0)

I didnt think we needed to resize for MKV, but I left the MEGUI SAR at 10:11 which might have been a mistake.

smrpix, the dvd source was apparently from 2005 (see link). I hadnt thought about the credits being an optical effect so you're right, it could be worse there...but the entire video has the flickering to varying degree. http://www.edition-filmmuseum.com/product_info.php/language/en/info/p21_Abenteuer-in-W...-Identity.html

[spiritgumm]

actually I need the denoiser (I watched the sample with wrong TV settings), but it seems to make the picture too soft.

[jagabo]

Then denoise less.

[spiritgumm]

I set the denoiser to "low" which worked just as well ("very low" was ineffective). I couldnt get RemovedirtMC to run, and RemoveDirt was too aggressive, so I left the specks in. Still took 10 hours for dvd video - guess I should have outputted in lossless codec before 2pass encoding.
Watching the original dvd, just lowering the sharpness on the player or TV made the noise much less distracting, so perhaps desharpening might have been a faster solution? Anyway, thanks as usual for the on-spot script and advice, Jagabo, and constructive comment from smrpix.

[newpball]

Actually I think given the age of the material that source is pretty decent.

Seeing this kind of noise actually means the transfer is relatively clean.

The noise is random so suppressing it will definitely destroy detail, if anything you should only apply a very mild noise suppression.

Compare it to a high quality tape deck, the noise is there and messing with it too much will only degrade the overall sound quality.

In other words, get used to it!

[jagabo]

Yeah, I rarely remove film grain myself. But I know many other people love their video with no noise. If your TV is making it worse it's misconfigured.

[spiritgumm]

I've rarely seen this before, so I'm pretty sure it's the video, not the hardware. As I've said, watching in Cinema/Movie mode or turning down the sharpness helps alot, but it shouldnt be required. You could play the original sample on your TV to see if it happens.

[jagabo]

You should be using only one "mode" on your TV. The one with all filtering turned off. No noise reduction, no sharpening, no auto contrast, no saturation boost, etc. So you can see the picture that it's being fed, not a hideous distorted version of it.

By the way, there are many other noise reduction filters that are faster than MCTD. ndjamena mentioned one FFT3Dfilter(). There's also TemporalDegrain(), TTempSmooth(), etc. I used MCTD because it's easy to set up with a preset.