Deinterlacing to remove field-specific static on video
 

Well, I was messing around with deinterlacing last night (a very dangerous thing, I know :p ), and I may have stumbled upon something. Using a Yadif mode and "keep bottom field" option, I managed to get rid of a static burst (from tape damage or temp. tracking error, I'm not sure) while keeping the picture mostly intact. There is still a distortion and a hue error, but the main point is that the picture remains visible and there is little static. I'm not sure how well this works on tracking errors, though.

There were two in this scene with similar errors. One was damage to the master broadcast tape (or interruption of broadcast. These did come from DirecTV SD satellite feeds recorded onto VHS), and the other was genuine tape damage. Once again, I'm using the SWAT Kats tapes (they've become my guinea pigs for rest. techniques. They have all sorts of minor, fixable errors, and they're literally right there on my hard disk), but I'd imagine this would work for any source with the same error. While deinterlacing is pretty bad for exporting to disk, inserting the frame into the video with a non-linear editor and exporting as interlaced. I'd imagine overall it'd have a bad effect on the video, but I haven't tried this yet.

Anyway, once you have the field with the least damage singled out, you can use photoshop to hide it with masking and color correction.

I'm sure I'm just repeated basically what y'all know already, but whatever :rolleyes: I personally think this is pretty damn cool.

For something like this, you'd be better off dropping the field -- odd or even. Not Yadif or any other advanced deinterlacer. The damage caused by the deinterlacing (known as "aliasing") could be repaired by an anti-alias filter, using Avisynth, such as Santiag() or AAA(). With cartoons, the damage is more noticeable, but I find it also easier to repair. AA'ing live-action video isn't always as well processed as animation.

This can also resolve visual vertical jitter, under the right circumstances.