Cartoon restoration project - film grain noise removal?

[via Email or PM]

Hey!

I was just reading a thread about cartoon restoration in which you mention it being your hobby and from what I've read, you're a pro at it!

I have a restoration project for something that's been released numerous times but I find the quality (to my eyes) really bad. I have managed to get my hands on the France PAL DVD which seems to be the best out there but the picture is very grainy/noisy. It's 39, about 28 minutes, episodes. It has parts where the fields are shifted so I'm fixing that first and I'm pretty much done. I now want to work on the film grain/noise. I have no idea of what I'm doing. I've tried playing around with AE "remove grain", neat video, BorixFX, etc... I work in Adobe Premiere Pro. I've used Avisynth a little. TFM() was actually used to fix the shifting but that introduced a few duplicate frames here and there. I had to manually find them and edit in PP.

The thing is I think I have very powerful tools to work with but don't how to tackle it at all.

I would really like to learn how to do it the right way. I'm not in a hurry and have time to invest.

Now... I just found out the animation was released on Bluray and all cleaned up! I have seen it and in deed, they did a great job with it BUT as stupid as they could be, they didn't fix the shifted fields!!!! Do I need to tell you how it looks??? Yeah, they blended the fields to get a "progressive" stream. Now, it's a mixture of real progressive and blended fields. There are a lot of indications that tell me their source was the same used for their DVD release a few years ago. I'm actually 100% sure of that.

So, I'm back on my project, thinking it can be done to fully restore from the DVD source but after having fixed the field shifting.

Here where I am so far:

Original: http://www.mediafire.com/view/fmxmrq...n/original.jpg

After NR: http://www.mediafire.com/view/w1qout...t_video_NR.jpg

The Bluray: http://www.mediafire.com/view/01j6cz...own_scaled.jpg

I would appreciate if you gave me you opinion based on those screen shots... Maybe even tell me how you would proceed (workflow) to get close to how the bluray looks (quite sharp edges, thin well defined black lines.
I can provide any kind of samples if needed!

Thank you so much.
Ghyslain

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[msgohan]

The original looks much better than the Blu-ray, IMO. I don't think it was ever supposed to look like an oil painting. Black outlines are missing, one of the character's nostrils, etc. If I were you I would retain some of that noise for texture. But I'm not you.

It sounds like you want one of the Avisynth filters aimed at cartoon lines. I've never used them myself, but I think one is called FastLineDarkenMod(). Maybe that's an old one.

It looks like the chroma on the DVD is shifted, or perhaps it's just worse due to the subsampling.

Quote:

Originally Posted by via Email or PM

TFM() was actually used to fix the shifting but that introduced a few duplicate frames here and there. I had to manually find them and edit in PP.

This scares me. You manually removed frames? And deleted audio at the same time? Or allowed it to desync..? It's normal for TFM with default options to create duplicate frames at scene changes but you can tweak it so it will interpolate orphaned fields instead of field-matching in the opposite direction. A sample of the original video where you have this problem would help.