Is it possible to fix wrongly resized interlaced video?

[zilog jones]

I've recently seen possibly the best way to ruin interlaced DV after trying to help some people in my college's kayaking club - they have some PAL DV that has been vertically resized to 720x480 - it's a hideous mess! :eek:

And to make it even worse they don't have the original, and they'd like it if it can be fixed - I told them not to keep their hopes up -_-

So, is there any way to fix an atrocity like this? I think it's just been simple "nearest neighbour" resized. I know there's not a hope in hell getting the fields back, but is there any way to blend the hell out of it or something to make this remotely watchable 25p?

[Mug Funky]

if it's point resized you could do a blur(0,1) and you might get away with a few horizontal bands but a generally watchable picture.

but if it's not quite nearest-neighbor like i suspect (had some crap like this the other day) but a really poorly done bilinear that is almost-but-not-quite nearest neighbor, then you're sh*t out of luck.

premiere's resizer is not quite nearest neighbor, not quite bilinear, all crap.

if they didn't even keep the tapes to re-capture off, then they don't deserve a decent video IMHO...

[zilog jones]

I've got a feeling it might have been edited in Premiere, so it might be that said screwy resizing. I'll see what that blurring does to it anyway - thanks!

if they didn't even keep the tapes to re-capture off, then they don't deserve a decent video IMHO...
I think they might have originals somewhere, but they're too lazy to edit the video all over again. I've told them to kill and/or throw into the sun whoever edited that video, and also told them never to touch anything resembling the word "NTSC" ever again. Besides all this, it had the cheesiest transition wipes in the world - like that page-turny one - they make me die inside...

[scharfis_brain]

@Mugfunky: blur(0.,1) helps always. Regardless which resizing algorithm was used before.

I suggest this:

avisource("crappy480.avi")
bicubicresize(width,576)
blur(0,1)
sharpen(0,amount)


upsizing to PAL before blurring will help to reduce overall image blurring a bit.

of course, one gets horrible ghosting like when a plain fielddeinterlace had been applied on the source.

[zilog jones]

OK, it turned out they just got the original un-ruined video and edited that again, so this was a waste of time!