Quote:
Originally Posted by Dirk the Daring
if I didn't let you see the source material and you could only choose 5 and nothing else
|
If you limited yourself in this way with any video, problematic or not, you'd find yourself up the proverbial creek. Either that, or at best you'd end up with half-baked results.
Levels, clipping, and gamma problems alone would require at least 3 or 4 popular filters alone, and none of them address noise or other glitches. Those filters would be ColorYUV, Levels, SmoothAdjust, and Tweak -- not to mention that ColorYUV itself provides 19 options, and SmoothAdjust provides multiple filters of its own with countless options more. What would you do about common problems like excessive interlace combing, macroblocks, aliasing, individual oversaturated colors, dropouts, frame hopping, or object shimmer, all ubiquitous defects that need specific filters?
I commonly work with VHS caps that require more than a dozen popular Avisynth and
Virtualdub filters to clean up. Color correction? I can advise at least 4 essentials in
VirtualDub and have used more. QTGMC, often used for a variety of fixes, requires a dozen or so support files that are essential stand-alone filters in their own right (dfttest, FFT3D, RGtools, NNEDI3, and MVtools to mention some). If your video is telecined and requires progressive input for cleanup, you can forget about deinterlace and keep TIVTC in your plugins. There are many more "top" filters, most of them for specific problems. These filters would include awarpsharp, CheckMate, chubbyrain2, DeBlock_QED, the dither tools package, GradFun3, DeHalo_Alpha, LimitedSharpenFaster, RemapFrames, vInverse, Stab variants, ChromaShift, FixVHSoversharp, ReplaceFramesMC, Santiag, RemoveSpots variants, RemoveDirt variants, TemporalSoften, and industrial-strength stalwarts like TemporalDegrain, MCTemporalDenoise, and MDegrain variants, and VirtualDub's CamcorderColorDenoise, SmartSmoother, and TemporalSmoother, just to mention some plugins that I use again and again.
5 filters wouldn't come close to making a useful toolkit for typical VHS problems. Browse through some of the restoration projects here and in other forums, and you'll see what I mean. But you're right when you say that the better way to get a handle on how many problems to solve is to post samples and see what has to be done with them. Any two samples would pose common problems, yet each of the two would also pose unique defects that require different fixes and techniques. One might need very little work, the other might need more.
Short answer:
There is no one-size-fits-all toolkit.