Hello all,
I'm coming to you for help to see what I might be able to do with part of a tape from 1985 I've been working on. I'm not sure if it's even possible to get much out of this, but I've seen some seriously impressive restoration work on this forum so I wanted to give it a shot. I'm also pretty new to this whole process and I'd like to learn.
First, I should list my setup:
Panasonic AG-7650P -> S-Video + XLR -> Diamond VC500 -> Avisynth/
VirtualDub
Here's a sample a little over 1 minute in duration in Lagarith format:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1qg...67hfe3TZypnlcC
I'm also attaching an x264-encoded sample to this post in case anyone just wants to take a cursory look at this without needing to download a 700MB file.
The only thing I've done to this is cuts to include the segments best illustrating the problems I'm going to show in this post - this is otherwise raw with no cropping, colorspace conversion, etc. If I've done something I shouldn't have, let me know.
On to the problems I see with this video:
The segment I'm posting here was filmed indoors, and this camera performed very poorly in low light, like a lot of handheld cameras in the 80s. All things considered, I think the image quality is not that bad; fairly stable, few dropouts/artifacts, and there's a good amount of detail. The problems are largely with color. I've been able to make some decent progress fighting heavy shadows with
ContrastMask, here are some examples with those corrections plus deinterlacing and denoising with
QTGMC:
From the second sample, you can see another problem with the low-light performance, which is that almost no color information was captured in many shots. The man in the hat looks almost as if he's been filmed in grayscale.
The man next to him in the costume has a bright red shirt on, but it's hard to even make this out. Skin tones are basically non-existent:
This looks more workable - with more lighting in the shot, we get some actual color, although there's a bad greenish-yellow cast here:
Any views through windows or of objects touched by sunlight have a very heavy blue/violet cast:
I'm not sure what to call this - chroma bleed? Even if it's not technically chroma bleed, I was able to address it to some degree with
FixChromaBleedingMod:
This helped erase some of the blue cast from the papers on the desk, the side of the calculator, and to some extent on the wall, although the results are a little uneven. I probably need to play with the threshold and blending more.
I've been attempting to color-correct this tape in Premiere (using Avisynth for the few filters I mentioned above, then export to Lagarith with
VirtualDub) simply because I find it a lot easier to use the Lumetri color tools, but in the posts I've seen from Sanlyn (I wonder if saying his name summons him to a forum post?
) it looks like he's using VirtualDub's color tools, which I'm not familiar with. Either way, I've not had much luck. I can't get the skin tones to look natural without wrecking the rest of the color in the frame.
Ideas? Thoughts? Hate mail? Would greatly appreciate your input on this. Thanks so much.
