This IS the Avid L2: Re: [Avid-L2] Improving old footage

Wednesday, August 21, 2019

Re: [Avid-L2] Improving old footage

If you want all the glory you saw in Jackson's work, you need an HDR workflow. More important than the resolution.

Scaling video is difficult as there is simply not much information to begin with compared even to HD, much less 4k. Most video in the 60's started as film and if you can get back to the film, that's ideal.

That said, your biggest problem with video is the de-interlacing. Scaling is relatively easy once the interlacing is removed, but scaling will magnify any deinterlace artifacts many times over. The method that you use to deinterlace depends greatly on the nature of the footage, particularly the nature of the motion in the footage. Personally, I prefer to work with the interlaced material and deinterlacing shot by shot in mastering rather than converting my sources.

Some people swear by methods that involve separating the fields, scaling them independently, and then "deinterlacing" at scale. I've never tried this. Usually using After Effects.

In software, I've had the best success with After Effects (sometimes), JES Deinterlacer, and believe it or not, Handbrake, particularly using YADIF method. The very best deinterlacing is hardware based. This requires a post-house with a skilled operator and even then it's hit or miss.

Scanning film is much more successful, though much 16mm is still very low quality. Even HD frequently exceeds the grain resolution in a lot of 16mm. Fortunately grain is analog and scales nicely, and scanning will capture far more contrast and color information.

Cheers,

tod

On Aug 20, 2019, at 3:08 PM, Lou Wirth loutv@mindspring.com [Avid-L2] <Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

It seems lately there has been a lot of attention on improving the quality of archival footage with Peter Jackson rising to the pinnacle with his colorization and uprezzing of WWI footage. I recently say immigrant footage from the 30s that looked amazing at 4K.

I am working on pre production of that doc that has hours of video from the 60s and lots of him from the 40s. My question is….what are some of the options to get this material to 4K. Producer is pushing for this so I wanted to know if there is software for some of this or is it all out-house to a a company with the heavy gear and expensive price tags.

Any ideas would be helpful.

Thanks

Lou

Lou Wirth Productions
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