8mm Vietnam film, capture in VirtualDub with Avisynth?
 

I work at a pawnshop and recently i bought a bunch of old stuff being cleaned from an old building and in it was a personal film from the vietnam war. in it is an 8mm film that i have viewed and have captured with an hd dslr camera and my iphone at 60 fps did a better job of not much flicker. ive used virtualdub and am novice at that but the film is dirty and i wish i could clean it up with something like videofred's script ive read about. i've read and tried to use avisynth but nothing works or it says the plugin is incorrect or something is wrong. any help would be appreciated and also the film is not of gore or killing its some helicopters and guys preparing food and then maybe a jeep ride through a small town and can see the people living there. thanks if anyone has time to assist me.

As long as the film is still viewable and not vinegared, I have a MovieStuff 8mm film scanner and should be able to give you a good-quality HD source capture. I would have to charge something over shipping (I'm in Houston) depending on how much film there is but I'll keep it reasonable, say 25 cents a foot. You can have the scan either as uncompressed AVI (very large...please include a blank HDD or high-capacity thumb drive) or as a compressed sequence of .jpg images which you can convert to mp4 or similar.

Wouldn't lossless compression be more workable instead of uncompressed (say, with Magic YUV).

@royallen: In the future, note that problems with scripts can't be answered without a copy of the script and without the actual error messages(s). Avisynth has no such message as "the plugin is incorrect" or "something is wrong". To say that "nothing works" doesn't help much, either. You'll get very useful information is you can be more specific.

And welcome to the forum. :)

The film scanner software doesn't recognize lossless codecs, but I could convert to HuffyUV or Lagarith in VirtualDub before saving for download or to the thumb drive.

Our advice for film is here: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...-film-dvd.html
For important footage, wetgate is suggested.
CinePost is $25/reel, $75 minimum order, and they do ProRes422 up to HD.

You cannot capture with a dSLR or cell phone, and have it not look like crap. Nor can you clean it up with Avisynth or VirtualDub, because the transfer is going to be lossy compressed on top of being a lousy method.

At very least, I'd have film cleaned before running it, and the Moviestuff Retroscan is a budget method that can give satisfactory results.

Thanks for your advice and i really want to learn how to use avisynth even at a novice level. I'll read some more forums here and see if i can grasp how to get started. I've been capturing the movie with i guess what is called a telecine box but it has a mirror in it and you put the projector on one side and then i've been using a dslr camera and changing a few settings on it to have very slight flicker, the camera has a 24 fps or 30 fps if recording full hd. it records in a .mov file and is usually a couple of gb size. maybe i should convert it to raw .avi file which i can do but it's about 200 gb and see if i get a result from that. i'm rambling again. thanks so much i'll continue my quest to learn
;;

I realize that you might be satisfied to a certain extent with the unusual form of film capture, but the method causes problems in restoration that could easily be avoided in the first place. Given your descriptions of the capture methods, it's likely that Videofred's scripts will be of very little help. Nevertheless, when it comes to recommendations about filters and details about scripting errors, there's no way to answer questions without video samples, copies of scripts, and more information about error messages.