Revisiting home movie restoration: rework color correction?

[ehbowen]

So, a few months back I posted about a project scanning and restoring a family friend's 40+ year old home movies from Super 8 film. Recently she contacted me and said that she wanted these old films, 29 in all, burned to a DVD which she could give out to her kids as a Christmas present.

Well, having gained a little experience in the intervening few months, I thought I'd take the opportunity to rework the color correction and restoration to improve the images for posterity. I thought the results came out rather well, especially with the "Bluebonnets" clip which was so faded and had a lot of artifacts from emulsion deterioration. Here's what I had to work with, and what I came up with:

First, here's the original scanned clip. First is the entire 50 foot reel rendered to SD mp4 with no processing; second I include a few frames of the original scan. My scanner's native resolution is 964p; I captured uncompressed and exported to an uncompressed AVI at 1080p (slight upscale). MP4 file rendered in Corel VideoStudio with no processing; AVI clip exported lossless from VirtualDub using HuffyUV.

Next, here's what I was able to do in VirtualDub using only three filters. I used Color Balance to shift the colors more towards green and blue to compensate for the fading; I then used Hue-Saturation-Intensity to give the colors much more "punch" and fine-tune the shading with a slight Hue adjustment, and finally I used NeatVideo v4 to reduce noise and filter dust and scratches. Below is the as-processed AVI clip of the same frames from above directly exported from VirtualDub using lossless HuffyUV compression.

Finally, here are the edited output versions. First clip is the final rendering as an MP4 with opening effects and background music by VideoStudio. All intermediate processing was performed lossless in 1080p HD AVI files; only the final render was compressed to mp4. I'm also including a portion of the Bluebonnet segment in 720p HD to show what it would look like in Blu-ray resolution (my friend has specifically requested DVDs, but since I did purchase a stack of single-layer BD-R M-Discs I might surprise her with a little "extra").

Lastly, here is the final mp4 render of the Christmas 1977 clip; see my original message from a few months back for the comparison frames from that one.

[BarryTheCrab]

May I inquire as to what device you are using to capture uncompressed? I’ve looked at Wolverines but you cannot bypass the MP4 codec.

[ehbowen]

I'm using a MovieStuff Retroscan Universal with the original camera...I'd like to upgrade to the new 2K camera but that's a little out of my budget until I get a steady full-time job again. The unit captures via USB 2.0 (2K camera upgrade is USB 3) to a homebuilt rackmount PC with Asrock AB350 gaming motherboard and AMD Ryzen 7 8-core CPU, 960 MB M.4 SSD C: drive, and two 1 TB HDDs in a Raid 0 array for maximum performance capturing. I can capture uncompressed at 15 fps with no lost/dropped frames. The Retroscan software can export as still frames (tiff or jpg), uncompressed AVI, or mp4 files at either 720p or 1080p resolution (capture is at a native 964p with the stock camera).

-- merged --

I see that I was in a hurry with the output and used an earlier render which had no music due to a file error. I'll re-render and post the updated clip when I get a chance (away from home now).

My bad; I was using a Linux laptop which apparently had an incompatible video player. Admins may delete this post.