Restoring "Let it be" music video

[rrats]

Is there any way to make this video look better?

https://files.videohelp.com/u/300108/vlc-record-2021-10-09-20h06m07s-The%20Beatles%20-...%20Be.mkv-.mkv

[DB83]

Well you have two choices


Peter Jackson or Truthler


Seriously tho I guess some heavy denoising etc will help but what is the source ?. I do not think this is the official video version.

[rrats]

Well you have two choices


Peter Jackson or Truthler


Seriously tho I guess some heavy denoising etc will help but what is the source ?. I do not think this is the official video version.

It is official, on 1+ Blu-ray.

Worst of all, it's the best looking version publicly available. Other versions are just VHS rips

It's also the only restored part of let it be film that hasn't been destroyed by denosing https://youtu.be/UocEGvQ10OE

[davexnet]

Did you record it while playing it in VLC? It has an odd frame rate, is that a byproduct?

[DB83]

It is official, on 1+ Blu-ray.

Ah. I only have the 1 disk version. (The 'good' stuff was on the 2nd disk)

[rrats]

Did you record it while playing it in VLC? It has an odd frame rate, is that a byproduct?

Yep. Original framerate was NTSC 24p

[davexnet]

Did you record it while playing it in VLC? It has an odd frame rate, is that a byproduct?

Yep. Original framerate was NTSC 24p

Apologies, somehow I got two files mixed up. Not sure what I was looking at.
Have you tried any restoration yourself, what do you think it needs ?

[rrats]

Sorry for confusion, the VLC demuxing probably damaged some metadata resulting in good video and weird length and frame rate.


It definitely needs some denosing, but the problem is, which one to use

[davexnet]

Sorry for confusion, the VLC demuxing probably damaged some metadata resulting in good video and weird length and frame rate.


It definitely needs some denosing, but the problem is, which one to use

I remuxed it in MKVtoolnix, it took care of the problems

I hear you. It's possible, if you have a decent GPU, to use HW acceleration and perhaps try NLmeans.
My current PC does not, so using CPU only, the implementation in FFmpeg/Handbrake/Vidcoder is really slow.

There have been some interesting results in other threads, in some cases the posters were not exactly forthcoming
about what they did

[DB83]

Why do I 'hate' these topics


Now I saw that film many moons ago on tv. Never viewed it on VHS or DVD. But they 'exist' sometimes at stupid prices. But I need to see it so, I guess, I will risk the scammy versions (I already own 2 dvd sets of questionable source and a set of the 'Anthology' which might be genuine but there again dem Chinese are clever barstewards) and acquire one.


So I equally guess that the VHS might actually be better than the dvd. But I am not about to chuck the better part of £100 on this. Will take my chances on the dvd and hope they will not be as crappy as they appear to the OP (which could equally be poor PAL to NTSC conversions)

[poisondeathray]

It can't be the original file - 1480x1080 is not BD compliant

[DB83]

^^Wasn't there a topic a week or so ago that discussed SAR and DAR which essentiantly, if memory serves, stated that as long as you set a DAR flag of 4:3 even on a 1920*1080 encode you end up with 1440*1080 display.

[dellsam34]

I don't know why people are abscessed about removing noise, I like watching it the way it is, it reminds me of how the film quality was like back in that era. Minimum restoration like the example above is okay but washing it out to look like modern videos comes at a price.

[Sharc]

Is there any way to make this video look better?

What do you mean by "look better"? This?

[Selur]

Personally, I would probably use something like

clip = lostfunc.DeSpot(o=clip)
# removing grain using MCDegrain
clip = mcdegrainsharp.mcdegrainsharp(clip=clip, frames=3, csharp=0.70, opencl=True)

wanting to get rid of the moving noise while keeping the general flair.

But depending on what you want you could also use something like:

clip = lostfunc.DeSpot(o=clip)
clip = lostfunc.DeSpot(o=clip)
# adjusting resolution before resizing 
clip = core.fmtc.resample(clip=clip, w=740, h=540, kernel="lanczos", interlaced=False, interlacedd=False)
from vsrealesrgan import RealESRGAN
# adjusting color space from YUV420P16 to RGBS for VsRealESRGAN
clip = core.resize.Bicubic(clip=clip, format=vs.RGBS, matrix_in_s="709", range_s="limited")
# resizing using RealESRGAN
clip = RealESRGAN(clip=clip, device_type="cuda", device_index=0) # 1480x1080

Cu Selur

[rrats]

I don't know why people are abscessed about removing noise, I like watching it the way it is, it reminds me of how the film quality was like back in that era. Minimum restoration like the example above is okay but washing it out to look like modern videos comes at a price.

i didn't mean removing noise, just stabilising it.. or even better, removing chrominance noise

[Selur]

just stabilising it.. or even better, removing chrominance noise

TemporalDegrain, SMDegrain, MCDegrainSharp, MLDegrain should all be good at helping there with slightly adjusted settings from the defaults.
(basically nearly all filters meant for grain removal)

[rrats]

Thank you Selur!

[rrats]

CCD for virtualdub cleans colour noise pretty well.

[poisondeathray]

^^Wasn't there a topic a week or so ago that discussed SAR and DAR which essentiantly, if memory serves, stated that as long as you set a DAR flag of 4:3 even on a 1920*1080 encode you end up with 1440*1080 display.

This is not supported on Blu-Ray, it only supports 1:1 square pixels for 1920x1080 frame size . The encoded frame size in the same is 1480 width. 1480 is not a supported dimension

[rrats]

Handbrake probably cropped it

[DB83]

@pdr


OOPs. I did not appreciate the 1480 was thinking of 1440


@s-mp


Rather an odd way to grab something from a Blu-ray. If I may add.

[smrpix]

Interesting that so many folks here are obsessing about the grain -- which is part of the nature of the original 16mm this was shot on -- but completely ignoring the huge hair in the gate.

[rrats]

Interesting that so many folks here are obsessing about the grain -- which is part of the nature of the original 16mm this was shot on -- but completely ignoring the huge hair in the gate.

That seems like an easy problem to solve as the camera shown the most during the video is the Paul one

[DB83]

^^ Yeah. It kinda hits you in the eye


One would have thought that Apple would have cleaned it up a bit.


Content-wise I am now a somewhat confused bunny. I located my own BD copy (1 disk version) actually expecting to see the same clip that appears on 'The Anthology'. But it is not. That one is mostly McCartney singing with a few cutaways including the production team. It actually comes over as a promo for the film. The same clip appears on the bootleg dvds I acquired years ago (I suspect that these were made from Anthology)


I have purchased from flea-bay a dvd of 'Let in Be' so I will be curious as to what is on that in this respect.

[poisondeathray]

Interesting that so many folks here are obsessing about the grain -- which is part of the nature of the original 16mm this was shot on -- but completely ignoring the huge hair in the gate.

That seems like an easy problem to solve as the camera shown the most during the video is the Paul one

What did you have in mind ? How would you "solve" it ?

[rrats]

What did you have in mind ? How would you "solve" it ?

Mask made in Photoshop one of premiere pros image blend featires.

I've seen that being done on this sub before with avisynth filters too, tho I can't find the post

[Selur]

All a question how much time you are willing to spend on it.
If you have the time you could also write Avisynth code to just blend or denoise stronger on just that part of the image.
I did have code for that (applying a filter only to a specific rectangle of a frame to only specific frames) years ago, but lost it due to a hdd crash and never hat the modivation to write it again. (but I remember it was a pain to write )

You could also manually edit those few frame in some photo editing software.


Cu Selur

[DB83]

So my 'dvd' arrived today. Honestly, I was not expecting much since I discovered after my previously posts that there exists no official dvd releases of this film.


Now the disk I received is a mess but that analysis is beyond this topic. What matters is the video quality and you might agree with me that it does not look too bad - not so happy with the ws conversion but you can not have everything.


Still puzzled why Apple released such crap on their own Blu Ray.

[dellsam34]

That LIB.mkv is crap, Wrong aspect ratio, black borders all around, noise bars from probably a x gen tape copy, very blurry ... etc