Encoding old film material

[dubious buccaneer]

I have an MPEG-2 video with high bitrate which is an old film shot in grayscale, with many artifacts: Lots of spots of various sizes showing up on frame, and some vertical and near-vertical 'ghost lines', i.e. nearly-vertical lines covering part of the frame height or all of it, a few pixels in width, in which everything is darker or lighter than the surrounding areas. There is also some temporal variance in the light levels, i.e. frames become a bit lighter overall (not intentionally as part of the film) then go back to being a bit darker. There may be some other artifacts which I haven't described, but these seem to be the most annoying.

I'm using AVISynth + VirtualDubMod to re-encode the film using a lower bitrate. What combination(s) of filters would be good for me to use to overcome these artifacts?

[setarip_old]

Hi!There is also some temporal variance in the light levels, i.e. frames become a bit lighter overall (not intentionally as part of the film) then go back to being a bit darker.It sounds like you've captured a video containing Macrovision protection.

What software and procedures did you use to capture it?