Processing video

[carlmart]

Recently I started testing Vegas as a simpler program to do things I usually would have done with Avid.

But Avid is more complex to use, even if I am much more familiar with it than with Vegas.

My idea is to process SD video files that are not available in HD into what I call "HD-like" or "HD cheating" files.

In the past I had done some processing with certain SD files that were poorly captures using Avisynth, and even if they were also it worked marvelously.

Unfortunately I forgot everything about Avisynth and I don't know if it would work with HD too.

Unpretending as Avisynth was, I could get processing with it that exceeded what I could get with Avid, for instance.

Some say many filters expensive video processing programs used were in fact Avisynth filters implementations in disguise.

Anyway, this time I'm dealing with the opposite: a film that was released first in DVD and later in BD. With awful results in the HD version, which should have been an improvement over the SD file.

This time I have uploaded just the initial image, but I can pick many others where the image is darker, much poorer in detail and lifeless.

I wonder how or what I could do, using Vegas, to get the HD video look closer to the SD video look.

Any hints?

[restore-chappy]

If the bottom image is HD than to my eyes that looks much better than the SD version which is blobby and soft,
in the HD version you can see fine particles in the light beams, edges are finer and sharp, more defined etc,
I suspect you like the saturated look of the SD version so i would just ramp up the saturation on the HD copy.....sorted!

I find it interesting what people judge to be better quality and their subjective experience...never ceases to amaze me

[carlmart]

IMHO the SD looks more wide range in contrast than the HD version. Not because it's more saturated, but because it has a wider range of grays.

Look at this gray scale version of the same image, and how dull middle-tone it looks.

I am a film professional, taught in the middle '70s to film, fortunately still under black & white rules. And the idea was always to handle and control the grays scale, which you usually fixed to the clapper for help in lab processing. Or black or white should always be present, both if possible, and to have as many grays degrees as possible.

Of course edges should be finer and sharper in the HD version, with more grain than SD: that's what HD should show. But I find the HD version much duller and poor in semitones.

I can show some other examples, where dark tones and high lights are present in the SD version and non existent in the HD version. If the cinematographer chose for the details to be there, they should. Your color correction should respect that. It was a very bad colorist that did this job, if there was any really. They didn't care for the film.

It ends up looking a dark film, when it's exactly the opposite. Even sun light scenes look poor.

[carlmart]

Hers's another example. This time of an interior.

The HD image looks dark, grayish and much flatter and duller than the HD one.

The other one was one try of mine, done some time ago and not with Vegas, to recover some of the "life" lost in the HD version.

Perhaps a little less saturation than the SD might be the way to go, but not brownish looking as the HD image.

I wish I could find a skin tone to base all the film correction on.

[jagabo]

Brightness, contrast, gamma, saturation, hue. Beyond that, make sure you are converting YUV video to RGB images with the correct color matrix. Rec.601 for DVD, rec.709 for BD.

[carlmart]

Perhaps I should start by taking color out, and begin with the first three.

Then get color back, and adjust saturation and hue. It sounds like an idea.

I abandoned DVD completely, and I convert anything DVD to MKV 720p

[restore-chappy]

You could try the Sony white balance plugin in Vegas and work with the video highlights filters,
hopefully you can recover some of the lost shadow detail in the HD version.

[restore-chappy]

Colour balance aside look at all the detail lost in the SD version, in the HD version you can see the lines in the wall paper, I think they added some extra grain in post processing in the HD version as well.

[jagabo]

You don't need to "take the color out" to work on levels -- use Vegas' waveform monitor tool to view the luma channel.

Yes, white balance should help if you can find things you know should be white/grey/black. But keep in mind colors are often skewed on purpose by the director.