How to clean up old film. Any tips?

Cliff

I have some old Super 8mm sound film which I have got transferred to video professionally. The file is standard def AV which I can use in Sony Vegas.
Firstly, I want to correct for some frame judder. Nothing particularly bad but I see a lot of restored films these days that have each frame perfectly aligned. Super 8 sprockets can get a bit worn out!

Secondly some of the frames are not accurately exposed- a bit flashy. This was due to a poor camera.


I am using an old Sony Vegas 8. Would a new version help with the above?

Any tips on what filters/ tools can be used to correct for the above?

Member 55145

VirtualDub is free and pretty good by the looks of it.

Music Fan

Avisynth can make great things for this kind of problems, you will find lots of informations on doom9 ;
Avisynth Usage - Doom9's Forum
This video shows together before and after Avisynth process ;

rogs

Both of the above suggestions offer good advice. But you do need to realise that both Virtualdub and AviSynth (especially the latter) have quite steep 'learning curves'. Neither are very 'user friendly'. .....
But if you want to get the best from your old films, then spending some time learning how to use these tools is probably a good idea.....
Even though both those programs are free, they will probably allow you to get better results with old film than you can get using a conventional commercial Non Linear Editor (NLE).
Consumer 'NLEs' - like Vegas - are not really designed to optimise the restoration of old film transcriptions...

Richard Jones

The problem of "flash frames" to be seen in old cine film transferred to video is very common and results from the slight delay experienced in cine cameras in getting the exposure automatically set  or, sometimes, from the brief hesitation in running the film through the gate at the right speed when the shutter was pressed. They may not always have been apparent when the cine film was projected on to a screen but are annoyingly obvious when they appear in a video. I've edited many miles of cine film transferred to video and hope your company used a Telecine system when making the transfer so as to reconcile the different frame rates --- 16 or 18 fps in cine and 25 fps in PAL video: if not, this may explain the juddering you are seeing. For the best results these flash frames need to be deleted or repaired individually (tedious but worthwhile). Incidentally, it might pay to disable re-sample in Vegas as this can help to some extent in certain circumstances.

As has been discussed at length in another recent thread, Mercalli by ProDad is an excellent alternative but you have to pay for it. It has a straightforward and easy learning curve and completely saved a precious film of mine which was suffering from excessive juddering resulting from a mis-aligned sprocket in the camera. For me the investment was worthwhile and the programme easy to use even in this most difficult of situations.

Richard

Music Fan

Fortunately, most of judder problems can be solved with Avisynth, even when a 16 or 18 fps movie has been filmed in 25 or 30 fps.
I had created a topic on doom9 for the very same problem in 2014 ;
How to de-interlace 25i coming from 8 mm film transfer ? - Doom9's Forum
The video sample is still available.
The solution was in this post ;
How to de-interlace 25i coming from 8 mm film transfer ? - Doom9's Forum
Especially this part of the script ;
                                        Code:                                tfm(display=false,mode=2,pp=1,cthresh=15,micmatching=3,mmsco=false,metric=1)tdecimate(mode=0,display=false, ssd=true,noblend=false,hint=true,cycle=86,cycleR=27 )        This makes field matching then frame removing to get the original frames. But the values may differ for other videos of course (in particular for cycle and cycleR).

Here is a part of the explanation (I was asking why the final framerate after this process becomes 17.1512 fps) ;
How to de-interlace 25i coming from 8 mm film transfer ? - Doom9's Forum

But don't worry, we can simply add
assumefps(16)#or 18
at the end to slow down or speed up the video without frame creation or removing, it simply changes the speed (and thus the length, as does PAL speed up).

Other part of the explanation (which actually seems wrong, look at my edit below) ;
How to de-interlace 25i coming from 8 mm film transfer ? - Doom9's Forum

The big advantage of this method is that it does not require de-interlacing or complex calculations, it simply analyzes video, gathers fields correctly and removes duplicate frames (which inevitably happens when a 16 or 18 fps movie is filmed in 25 or 30 fps).
Then the filtering can be done (to remove dots, correct colors, resize ...).

As rogs said, it's not that easy at first glance but with the help of other people (including ours), it's not that complicated.
And I don't know any other method to do it as well, as fast and free.


Edit : Re-reading johnmeyer's explanations on doom9, I realized there was something wrong (he says 26 fields should be discarded but the script shows 27), thus I made tests and changed values for cycle and cycleR (for tdecimate function), here is my explanation ;
How to de-interlace 25i coming from 8 mm film transfer ? - Page 5 - Doom9's Forum
But his method to analyze video (field repetition) was good anyway.
I copy here my tdecimate settings ;
                                        Code:                                tdecimate(mode=0,display=false,ssd=true,noblend=false,hint=true,cycle=26,cycleR=8)

Cliff

That is a pretty remarkable clean up. I will look into that.
The uneven exposure was due to it being shot on a Sankyo sound camera, which was one of the first I could afford. The problem was caused because the film is driven over the sound head at a constant speed by a small motor. The loop between the gate and the sound capstan in monitored with a small lever which slows or speeds up the pull down claw- causing the exposure to change. The loop is maintained this way.  I shot a few films with this camera before getting a Canon, which was much better in this respect.

Anyway, I'll look into Avisynth. I used it many years ago, for another purpose, but I know the learning curve is steep and very time consuming.
Thanks for all your replies.

Mr.D

You can download a free learning edition of Nuke from The Foundry. It will only output in 1920x1080 as a limitation of it being the learning edition.

Apart from that its pretty much the full package. I would recommend you get the NukeX version with the Furnace optical flow tools.

It is about the best tool for reconstruction / restoration work however you may find it a complex package as its pretty much the pinnace of compositing packages (its £5k for a commercial licence last time I checked)

rogs

Wow - that's seriously expensive!!  Think I'd stick with taking some time to learn about using Avisynth, which can do this kind of restoration just as well ... and is a LOT cheaper

Richard Jones

Gulp! Deep Breath! That's a lot of money but those results are truly impressive, Might be worth playing around with the free non-commecial version when I've got some time.

Richard