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-   -   Frame rate and ghosting VHS issues- 60i back to 24p? (https://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/video-restore/6090-frame-rate-ghosting.html)

Tygerbug 08-24-2014 06:33 AM

Frame rate and ghosting VHS issues- 60i back to 24p?
 
Hi everyone. I do film and video restoration as a hobby. I restored The Thief and the Cobbler, an unfinished animated classic by Richard Williams (Who Framed Roger Rabbit) ... I started that project in 2006, and the most recent restoration took about two and a half years to complete, involving a ton of frame by frame work. Possibly the most complex restoration of any film ever done, though who knows -- You can watch it here.

http://www.youtube.com/user/TheThiefArchive


Lately I've been doing a lot of Muppet material from VHS. I've also just been sent a VHS of an extremely rare film from the 1970s, and been asked to clean it up as best I can.

I know I need help with this one, though. When I was restoring The Thief, I had a lot of help from Christoph Nass, who filtered the video sources, removing some ghosting, enlarging and improving the video, and getting them into 24p format. He did this in Avisynth. That's not available to me, as I'm on a Mac.

My own restoration work often involves noise reduction in After Effects, painting out damage and recreating shots in Photoshop, editing and compositing sources together in Final Cut Pro, dirt removal and so on.

A sample of my work:
https://vimeo.com/97449247

What I can't really do is unpick frame rate issues caused by a bad conversion.

I often run into sources which were originally 25p, 50i or 24p and have been badly converted to 60i, or something like that. I really need help on this, on undoing that and really getting the frame rates right. Not easy work, and Christoph's pretty busy so I can't ask him to do everything!

Here's two clips:

http://www.mediafire.com/watch/77sjy...ass-Clip1.mpeg
http://www.mediafire.com/watch/24fw1...ass-Clip2.mpeg

I would assume that the film was originally 24p. It's 60i now, and extremely ghosty. You can see when it cuts from one shot to another, that it takes five or six frames for that transition to happen. It was probably filmed by someone off a projector screen. My source is trying to track down an actual 35mm film version, but I don't know if he'll be successful. The trailer is included on this same VHS, and is in slightly better quality, although it needs lots of manual fixes.

What I'd like ideally is for this 60i video to be converted to 24p in a way that lessens the ghosting effect somewhat, and is at least somewhat accurate to what the original frames would have been - smooth rather than jerky. This is probably best done in AviSynth, although if there's an option I could run on my own Mac I'd love to hear it.

If anyone has any ideas, you can contact me here or at gilchristgarrett at gmail . com.

lordsmurf 08-24-2014 08:16 AM

I see some areas where you could improve on the Vimeo videos -- chroma overlay and antialiasing seems unchanged between before and afters. The audio seems to be somewhat muffled, and that may (or may not) be better filtered. And then it actually seems to have gotten softer, which it should not. It should either stay unchanged or get sharper.

I do want to see your clips -- but we can't use Mediafire (required JS, site can be dirty/unsafe). Use Dropbox instead.

The Youtube channel looks nice, but I don't want to sit through ads to view the clips. Either attach them here to the forum or use Dropbox again.

Yeah, I can see the painted-out areas for sure. It looks good. That takes so much patience! (I hate doing it.) I'm doing something similar to that right now to restore a cartoon series. I have to use different Avisynth scripts on different scenes, and it's just awful. But there's never going to be another way to see this cartoon in watchable quality (caught up in rights hell), and I want to.

After Effects NR is not that good for some filter types -- Avisynth is better. Keyword: some. AE is superior in some ways too.

Tygerbug 08-24-2014 03:58 PM

2 Attachment(s)
Here are Dropbox links.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/i8skrl7kqu...lip1.mpeg?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4v4xbfh2dg...lip2.mpeg?dl=0

Though it's hard to judge without interlacing, on the Santa Claus Switch I ran some stabilization in VirtualDub which did make the picture very slightly softer. I'm sure it could have been sharpened and improved -- though I have no plans to revisit it.

lordsmurf 08-26-2014 03:38 PM

2 Attachment(s)
I'm not seeing too much ghosting. What I mostly see is interlacing, which would only appears ghosted in a player that deinterlaces on the fly. However, some ghosting is present.

Also never assume anything was shot 24p. That's not always the case.

You have several choices here:
1. Leave the framerates alone. This is second best option.
2. Deinterlace the 60i footage, and decimate it to 24p. This will probably look bad.
3. Deinterlace the 60i and work with it as 29.97p. Still not great.
4. Extract the 60i to 60p, and leave it alone, as mentioned by jagabo on Videohelp. But still not optimal.
5. Extract the 60i to 60p, then decimate to 24p. I think this looks best in this scenario.

This is actually not horrible source. It should be fairly easy to correct in Avisynth with VirtualDub. After those are done, a secondary NLE would probably be used to improve the colors even more than what was done in the first pass. This is really an easy project.

Attached is my final quick draft.

First, make sure the source is a lossless AVI. Use VirtualDub as needed to get there.

Next, start with Avisynth:

Code:

AVISource("C:\Grass-Clip1.avi")
ConvertToYUY2 # script below this line requires YUY2
Cnr2("xoo",4,2,64) # remove chroma banding noise, wide UV setting
ColorYUV(autowhite=true) # auto white balance
ConvertToYV12 # script below this line requires YV12
Deen() # remove edge noise
MergeChroma(aWarpSharp(depth=10), aWarpSharp(depth=20))
chubbyrain2(th=1, radius=15) # remove moire rainbows
Crop(8,8,-22,-10)
AddBorders(15, 9, 15, 9)
ConvertToYUY2 # assumes VirtualDub or MPEG encoder is next in video workflow chain

Then move to VirtualDub. See attached the attached vcf settings file.

Code:

VirtualDub.audio.SetSource(1);
VirtualDub.audio.SetMode(0);
VirtualDub.audio.SetInterleave(1,500,1,0,0);
VirtualDub.audio.SetClipMode(1,1);
VirtualDub.audio.SetConversion(0,0,0,0,0);
VirtualDub.audio.SetVolume();
VirtualDub.audio.SetCompression();
VirtualDub.audio.EnableFilterGraph(0);
VirtualDub.video.SetInputFormat(11);
VirtualDub.video.SetOutputFormat(11);
VirtualDub.video.SetMode(3);
VirtualDub.video.SetSmartRendering(0);
VirtualDub.video.SetPreserveEmptyFrames(0);
VirtualDub.video.SetFrameRate2(0,0,1);
VirtualDub.video.SetIVTC(0, 0, 0, 0);
VirtualDub.video.SetCompression(0x75796668,0,10000,0);
VirtualDub.video.filters.Clear();
VirtualDub.video.filters.Add("Color Camcorder Denoise 1.7");
VirtualDub.video.filters.instance[0].Config(50,1);
VirtualDub.video.filters.Add("levels");
VirtualDub.video.filters.instance[1].Config(0x113B,0xFFFF,0x00FFFE8F,0x0000,0xFFFF, 1);
VirtualDub.video.filters.Add("Color Mill(2.1)");
VirtualDub.video.filters.instance[2].Config(29812, 25716, 25700, 29812, 25716, 19556, 30375, 22372, 22359, 25700, 25700, 25700, 25700, 1124, 5);
VirtualDub.video.filters.Add("Color Camcorder Denoise 1.7");
VirtualDub.video.filters.instance[3].Config(100,1);
VirtualDub.video.filters.Add("levels");
VirtualDub.video.filters.instance[4].Config(0x0C4E,0xFFFF,0x01096E97,0x0000,0xFFFF, 1);
VirtualDub.video.filters.Add("Camcorder color denoise 1.6 MT");
VirtualDub.video.filters.instance[5].Config(100,1);
VirtualDub.video.filters.Add("Frequency Suppressor of the Noise 3.6 MT");
VirtualDub.video.filters.instance[6].Config(70,70,2,0,1);
VirtualDub.audio.filters.Clear();

That pre-processes the video in the 60i domain. The base color work, chroma noise reduction, and general NR are now done.

I've (purposely) left out a step!

You need to convert the 60i to 60p (actually 59.94i to 59.94p). This is done with a deinterlace filter, and both VirtualDub and Avisynth have options for this. For this test, I used the Yadif filter in VirtualDub, and it doubled the frame rate (TFF) to 60p.

Then you need to use Avisynth to decimate with SRestore, to create 24p from 60p. This filter will help to remove many of those blur frames.

Code:

AVISource("C:\.avi")
SRestore(FRate=23.976) # remove frame blending
ConvertToYUY2

Now, you can try and combine some of these processes together, but be aware that Avisynth and VirtualDub can be unstable. I tried to put too much into a single script, and it'd crash on me. I had wanted to do all Avisynth and then all VirtualDub, but that wasn't going to happen here.

Tygerbug 08-26-2014 07:00 PM

Thank you; I'll try to give it a shot.

It's a feature film, and was definitely 24p to begin with --

The motion in your sample looks pretty much correct as 24p -- pretty close to what the original frames would have been.

[I am on Mac OSX so will have to call in some help for the AviSynth processing.]

lordsmurf 08-27-2014 04:28 AM

You'll need to using either Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion to get Windows XP on Mac. VirtualBox may even work, though I've not tried.

Mac OS X is the wrong tool for this sort of work.

sanlyn 08-27-2014 04:34 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tygerbug (Post 34004)
Here's two clips:

http://www.mediafire.com/watch/77sjy...ass-Clip1.mpeg
http://www.mediafire.com/watch/24fw1...ass-Clip2.mpeg

I would assume that the film was originally 24p. It's 60i now, and extremely ghosty.

Not a safe assumption, especially with PAL originals. But in this case, whether or not it was originally shot as film, there's nothing you can do with it. It was telecined at one point, and someone who didn't know what they were doing managed to field-blend deinterlace the video. Many people have tried to repair field-blended video, but none have succeeded. Not even with Avisynth.

The blended images aren't ghosting, but there are some chroma edge-ghosts and some really serious dct ringing and chroma smearing, not to mention wrecked color and incorrect IRE levels. And just for good measure, it appears that previous processing included all or most of those defects intact at the time of the field-blend exercise. Exceptionally creative. I'm amazed at the endless number of ways people can devise in their efforts to ruin video.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tygerbug (Post 34004)
I know I need help with this one, though. When I was restoring The Thief, I had a lot of help from Christoph Nass, who filtered the video sources, removing some ghosting, enlarging and improving the video, and getting them into 24p format. He did this in Avisynth. That's not available to me, as I'm on a Mac.

:eek:

lordsmurf 08-27-2014 04:47 AM

FYI: I have no idea who Christoph Nass is. (And as of now, don't really care.) So not sure if the bug eyes is because (1) you know who this is, or (2) the OP admitted to being on a Mac, which is the wrong tool for this sort of work.

There's a pretty serious chroma shimmer here. It does look like a poor cam screen used by modern film pirates, but I highly doubt that's what this is. This is likely some sort of loss caused by poor film stock, combined with lousy film transfer equipment, and then butchered even more by lousy digital methods. If I had to guess, I'd say this is a 16mm copy telecined with the home equipment, converted to DV. I've seen this before. We deal with a lot of it that was dumped to VHS. The color is better, though only slight, because DV didn't 4:1:1 it.

sanlyn 08-27-2014 07:27 AM

Sorry, I don't know who Mr. Nass is either. But fortunately he seems to know something about video. The bugeye was myself: after the O.P. has struggled for so long with a system and software that is otherwise OK but which in several basic ways is not so appropriate for his purpose, and after I read that the O.P. sees what's available elsewhere that has fit the bill on more than one occasion for these labors of love, I see the last line in that quoted paragraph. By this time I would have found a way to run Windows.

Tygerbug 08-27-2014 07:44 AM

I was just crediting Christoph for his work -- although he does post at Doom9 etc.

My computer is a "Hackintosh" - which are unpredictable - and I am very gunshy about running Parallels or such in case it wrecks my system somehow. It was actually built with the intention of running Windows on part of the partitioned drive but I never went through with it.

But it's tempting. I have a lot of problematic footage which it seems like only AviSynth could deal with properly - and in general I'm often stymied by an inability to run most Windows programs.

Here is maybe the worst piece of video I have --

https://www.dropbox.com/s/tz1ywww7ok...0rip.mpeg?dl=0

Shot off a TV screen, with all sorts of flicker, then additional tape damage all over the place on the recording.

I've considered putting the time in and actually restoring this one - probably as 25p since it's for a PAL-format compilation [it's 60i now, and would have been 50i originally]. Would take a lot of time to do, though - all those dropouts.

It would be nice to process out some of the flicker for a start. Rough stuff.

lordsmurf 08-27-2014 08:15 AM

@sanlyn: So what do you think of my quick restore work? :hmm:

@Tygerbug: I'd not waste my time with something like that. You need to find better source. If it was recorded off of a color TV, using a video cameras (obviously not filmed), it means that it was done in the age of home recorders. Therefore a better copy must exist somewhere. Find it.

Where did you find that awful clip? It looks like Youtube schlock.

Tygerbug 08-27-2014 08:23 AM

I've been looking for better sources for these clips since the 90s. The actual origin of that clip remains unknown.

I do a lot of searching, but sometimes good film and video just doesn't turn up --

You've convinced me. I'm going to try Parallels.

sanlyn 08-27-2014 09:17 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by lordsmurf (Post 34137)
@sanlyn: So what do you think of my quick restore work?

Thought your mpg looked about as good as it ever will. I tried a few plugins myself until the late hour got to me. It's one of those damage cases you keep going back to after a couple of days (or weeks) to see what else could be done. That shimmer and flicker keeps reminding me of tape to tape dupes -- that's a guess, as heaven only knows what's been done to it. I'm keeping the clips, maybe I'll throw it in my Windows AfterEffects to see if some blending and ColorFinesse can help with the color problems. I have some learning to do in that respect.

Anyway, nice work. Even if it was "quick" as you say, your patience with it certainly exceeded mine, LOL.


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