Restoring 1960s video 8mm -> VHS -> MP4

[jmcriley]

Hi all - newbie underwater here. I'd really appreciate any advice on cleaning up the yellow and red striping in the attached video clip, if that is even possible. I'm working from an MP4 file that was digitized from a no-longer existing VHS file that was in turn transferred from a no-longer existing 8mm film from 1962. So all I have is the MP4 file and VERY LITTLE knowledge of video editing and restoration. So far I've been using Movavi software and TensorPix to mess around with short clips like this to see what might work with the full footage. Is there any guidance you can give me about what kinds of filters or enhancements or whatever to apply, and at what suggested levels?
Thanks for considering this.
- jmcriley

[Selur]

Not sure whether this helps,...

Looking at the YUV channels:

you can see that the luma (Y) plane is 'fine'.
So you might want to look into blurring the UV planes. (or maybe downscale and reupscale just the chroma planes)

[johnmeyer]

You have a mess on your hands.

Before you can try to get the stripes removed, you need to deal with the blends and duplicates. The system that was used to transfer the film to video was probably not much more than pointing a video camera at the movie screen. As a result, the video camera captured blends of adjacent frames. You can easily see this on the frames which contain dirt blobs. The dirt obviously exists on only one frame of film, but in your video, the dirt persists for at least two frames.

Your video is running at 30.048 fps. The original film was probably taken at 16 fps. If you are new to this, you will probably get confused by frames per second (fps). The motion on the video is obviously too fast. You can slow it down simply by changing the fps. The video will not change, but fewer frames will be played each second so the motion will be slower. You can also slow it down by removing blended frames and then adjusting the fps. For instance, if you eliminated half the frames and then played it at half the fps (15.024), the motion would be the same speed. What is needed is to use software like this:

The power of Avisynth: salvaging "botched" transfers of old 8mm films to DVD

to remove as many blends as possible, and then set the fps so the film plays at what looks like a normal speed.

Only after you do that can you try to deal with the chroma stripes. My expertise is in dealing with film and getting a good transfer. There are others here who may have some good ideas of how to reduce the striping artifacts.

[jmcriley]

Many thanks, Selur and JohnMeyer for your really helpful notes. I took what I could understand of the high level information from both to try a more simplistic solution that I could handle with my limited experience, and it worked quite well: I cleaned up the original film file in TensorPix (Deinterlace, Film Clean v2, Noise Reduction v3 and Deep Clean Pro AI filters) then imported to Movavi, duplicated the track, set one track to grayscale, left the other with original coloring and adjusted opacity on the grayscale track to re-introduce small amounts of non-distorted color. Thanks again.

[lordsmurf]

film > VHS > digital has some special additive problems beyond mere film > digital

I would be surprised if any of the GUI consumer fodder software was able to surpass what johnmeyer and myself can do in something like Avisynth. I just do not see. Some before/after would be needed.

[Bwaak]

Written by Astrid Lindgren, translated from the Swedish by Patricia Crampton:

‘Where are all your paintings of cocks?’ asked Midge.
‘Look over there,’ Karlson pointed to a sheet of paper tacked on the wall by the cupboard. Right down in one corner of the paper there was a ****, a very, very small, red ****. The rest of the paper was bare.
‘ “A very lonely ****,” that’s what that picture is called,’ said Karlson.
Midge looked at the little ****. Could Karlson’s one thousand **** paintings all boil down to this little ****?
‘ “A very lonely ****,” painted by the world’s best **** painter,’ said Karlson, his voice shaking. ‘Oh, how beautiful and painstaking that picture is! But I mustn’t start to cry now, because it will make my temperature go up.’

[Alwyn]

I would be surprised if any of the GUI consumer fodder software was able to surpass what johnmeyer and myself can do in something like Avisynth.

Here's your chance. You've got the Before in post #1. Show what you can do.

[davexnet]

Fanfilter may be able to help, parameters can be adjusted for fine tuning:

lwlibavvideosource("i:\test\Rick 1st Comm Raw LINES.mp4")
crop(256,0,-256,-0)
spline64resize(width/2,height/2)
turnleft()
fan(yUV=3,opt="edge",lambda=45)
turnright()
cnr2()

[Selur]

Smoothing it,.. (https://pastebin.com/A9aB0RY2)

[davexnet]

Smoothing it,.. (https://pastebin.com/A9aB0RY2)

Very nice result

[themaster1]

With about 6 lines of code you can do magic

v=LWLibavVideoSource(source="C:\Rick 1st Comm Raw LINES.mp4",format="yv12")
a=LWLibavAudioSource(source="C:\Rick 1st Comm Raw LINES.mp4")
audiodub(v,a)
U = UToY().ttempsmooth(maxr=6,lthresh=150, strength=6).KNLMeansCL(d=3,a=8,s=2,h=6)
V=VToY().ttempsmooth(maxr=6,lthresh=150, strength=6).KNLMeansCL(d=3,a=8,s=2,h=6)
YToUV(U,V,last)

[davexnet]

With about 6 lines of code you can do magic

v=LWLibavVideoSource(source="C:\Rick 1st Comm Raw LINES.mp4",format="yv12")
a=LWLibavAudioSource(source="C:\Rick 1st Comm Raw LINES.mp4")
audiodub(v,a)
U = UToY().ttempsmooth(maxr=6,lthresh=150, strength=6).KNLMeansCL(d=3,a=8,s=2,h=6)
V=VToY().ttempsmooth(maxr=6,lthresh=150, strength=6).KNLMeansCL(d=3,a=8,s=2,h=6)
YToUV(U,V,last)

That's pretty good too. I looked in my plugins library and found vsTTempsmooth.dll, seems to be a vapoursynth port,
but there was the original Avisnth TTempsmooth - not sure what that's about.

Unfortunately, I can't run KNLMeansCL due to my old old motherboard and lack of discrete GPU

[lordsmurf]

How about uploading the entire "source" MP4 somewhere?
Not just a little clip.

[Selur]

@lordsmurf: The author of the thread (jmcriley) already found a solution, this is just playing around.