Tape Restoration Assistance Needed, Complete Beginner

[toonj]

Hello there! I'm VERY new to all of this and would like the assistance of the users here if possible. This is probably a very, very, very atrociously stupid question and I apologize in advance :P

I have some captures of tapes from the cancelled video game "Sonic X-treme" that were posted 10 or so years ago on a now defunct forum thread by a former developer, before it is asked I obviously do NOT have the actual tapes themselves nor would I have any way of re-capturing them.

Thankfully, two of three are in relatively good condition AFAIK, and only need a color correction (and removing the audio in one case since it was just silence).

Original:

[Attachment 91830 - Click to enlarge]

Color Correction:

[Attachment 91831 - Click to enlarge]

However, the last tape is where I'm having trouble, and this is why I've come here.

[Attachment 91832 - Click to enlarge]

It's in a VERY poor state. It has the washed out colors of the other 2, but on top of that the audio track is very tinny sounding and cut off at the beginning (I've manually corrected this using an upload of the song by the original composer--it's in MP3, sadly, but I assure you ANYTHING is better than how the original sounds by a long shot lol), and the quality has degraded severely compared to the other 2--take a look at Sonic or the numbers at the top of the screen! One of the biggest issues is the flashing bar at the top of the screen, it's very distracting and doesn't show up in any of the other tapes.

I have VirtualDub2 and StaxRip on my hands (I couldn't get AviSynth working nicely with my setup + these AVI files due to their encoding, plus I have ZERO clue what I'm doing lol), and I was wondering what steps would be needed to at least get this to a nicer standard of quality before I start with color correction? I won't be doing any deinterlacing on this just yet (I'm not confident in my ability to do that, plus I'd like to keep that in since it's authentic :P), I just want to get this to a cleaner result before I start work on a CC. I absolutely do NOT want to crop out anything or something similarly destructive.

I've attached a small snippet of the tape to this post...hopefully it should be enough to get the ball rolling but if not I can provide more clips. The full video is too big for it to be uploaded here sadly. Please be aware due to limitations involving editing software this has deinterlacing automatically applied...nothing I can do there. Try to ignore it.

Any and all help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

[Selur]

Do you have a clip that wasn't badly/wrongly deinterlaced or is this your source?

[toonj]

Do you have a clip that wasn't badly/wrongly deinterlaced or is this your source?

Hopefully this works better, the original was a limit of my primary editing software (Davinci Resolve, which is what I use for color correction...anything deeper is done elsewhere) when exporting to MP4...comparing them side by side looks right to me. If not I can supply the Archive.org link to all 3 AVI files if that's ok with the staff here?

[davexnet]

If not I can supply the Archive.org link to all 3 AVI files if that's ok with the staff here?

yes, post the link to the source

[toonj]

Alright, here's the original source. I would've provided this earlier but I wasn't sure if the moderators here would be ok with that...but seeing as y'all are asking it should be ok. These are directly off the original links from back in the day (most people base them off Youtube reuploads) so this is as good as you can possibly get.

It should automatically download upon clicking...if it brings you to the page below you're looking for the one marked "Sonic Xtreme - SonicDemo96.avi". There are other tapes on the page that are worth a check too since all I've done is a color correction, but they look pretty much entirely pristine to me so I wouldn't bother (at the very least nowhere NEAR as damaged as SonicDEMO96)

[Attachment 91835 - Click to enlarge]

[Selur]

Since the direct download link doesn't work for me: https://archive.org/download/SonicXtremeAVIs seems to be the correct one.
That avi file isn't interlaced, but field shifted. Use field matching instead of deinterlacing. (you can clean the chroma and sharpen stuff a bit, but you won't get rid of all the blends, since those are already in the fields,..)

[toonj]

Since the direct download link doesn't work for me: https://archive.org/download/SonicXtremeAVIs seems to be the correct one.
That avi file isn't interlaced, but field shifted. Use field matching instead of deinterlacing. (you can clean the chroma and sharpen stuff a bit, but you won't get rid of all the blends, since those are already in the fields,..)

Odd, it should work...that's my personal reupload. It's the same files on both links though (or should be anyway) so it should be fine.

I did test doing a field match instead of a deinterlace and I don't think this is correct. What I ended up with was the same combing artifacts as before (and adding a deinterlace on top of that just to experiment made it extremely choppy). I'm not touching those at the immediate moment either way though as I've said, maybe later though.

Thank you for the advice on chroma cleaning! Will give it a shot on SonicDEMO96 and report back...