Tools for denoising old SD Footage wrapped in 1080p?

[Sebarino]

A friend of mine asked me if I could help him with some old footage in SD recorded in the 90's, for which he doesn't have the original camera or tape anymore. Even worse, this footage was not captured in the same resolution it was recorded at, but at some point he gave it to someone who digitized it and then scaled it up to 1080p, but without any upscaling filters like Bicubic, Lanczos, etc, just imagine what happens if you upscale something without any antialiasing. It becomes a blocky mess, especially in scenes that show a lot of smaller things in the frame, meaning like a wide shot of a group of people. And I think they also removed one field completely, which makes an already poor definition into something much worse, not even half the quality, because it might be in theory, but what is left after removing that field is not the same as having a full frame in 480 pixels and downsizing it to 240 pixels.

Added to this, it has a lot of awful fringing. Part of the footage has someone playing a cello, and there's a horrible amount of rainbow effect on the strings. So you have a bad combination of problems here. It was either digitized in SD and then upscaled to HD without any filters, or maybe even played back in the SD camera but the capturing device they used (a piece of information I don't have), was set to record in HD, but it was some cheap USB 2 device that promised HD capture but without any sort of filter or upscaling method that wasn't just resizing each frame to 1920x1080.

If I had the original tape, or at least footage in SD, I would power up my old PC, load it in MeGUI and start running some tests with the different deinterlacers and upscalers and all the great things it has, and I will still give that a try just in case, but because of the way it was digitized, it won't be as good as having the original source.

That being said, I thought I would ask the experts here, because this is not something I do often, so there might be new tools that would help in a case like this, maybe even some AI tools, although I know those are more geared towards photos than video, but perhaps there's something I don't know about it.

Anyway, any ideas you can all throw at me, I'd really appreciate it. I'd love to post stills of it to give you an idea of what I'm talking about, but my friend asked me not to because it's personal stuff, and he's a very private person, so I will respect that.

[Alwyn]

Without seeing even a still, it's going to be very difficult to provide any targeted help. I short sample of video would be highly desirable.

Do you know how to use AVISynth?

[Sebarino]

Without seeing even a still, it's going to be very difficult to provide any targeted help. I short sample of video would be highly desirable.

Do you know how to use AVISynth?

I have used it on occasion, although it's been several years, but that's just a Wiki away, plus MeGUI has a lot of commands to send to Avisynth. There's also VirtualDub, which has its own filters, so I will also take a look at that. Nothing urgent, it's just for a friend, so I'll see all the options, and hopefully learn something new.

[Selur]

Share a short sample of what you want to convert if you need suggestions

[Sebarino]

Share a short sample of what you want to convert if you need suggestions

Like I said, it's not up to me, and I think I described it pretty well.

[Alwyn]

If your mate is not going to give us a sample so we can home in on the exact issue and propose a fix, I think your best bet is to do a Google Search for all the denoising options. There are plenty of them.