Color Bleed/Oversaturation (Reds) on VHS tapes

[nbatapes]

Hey everyone,

After taking in a lot of great advice on this forum, I think I've been able to restore many of my basketball tapes to a good level (see attached sample). I am having trouble with one particular aspect, however...

If you look around the half-court line on this sample clip, you will see that the red/orange is 'bleeding' into the court. Can anyone provide any suggestions on how to fix this?

Many thanks!!

[jagabo]

VHS only has about 40 lines of color resolution over the entire frame. That means the colors always bleed like that. It's noticeable in a situation like that because the red is bleeding out to a bright tan area. You're getting just as much bleeding with the yellow text but it's less obvious over the black background.

You can sharpen the chroma to some extent. I've posted about that many times. Something like:

AviSource("NBA Chroma Test.avi") 
MergeChroma(last, Spline36Resize(304, height).aWarpSharp(20).Sharpen(1.0, 0.5).nnedi3_rpow2(4, cshift="Spline36Resize", fwidth=width, fheight=height))
ChromaShiftSP(x=2, y=1)

You often have to follow up with a chroma shift to better align the sharpened chroma with the luma. And the strong aWarpSharp() may lose the colors of very small objects. I think this is the same frame:


[Attachment 55476 - Click to enlarge]