Cleaning up a horrible source

[Umamio]

I'm looking for help or suggestions for improving the look of this material (regrettably this is directly from the source DVD)

From what I can tell it's suffering from aliasing, washed out colour, compression artifacts, and some deinterlacing artifacts (chroma from previous frame apparent on scene change)

Crap in = Crap out, yes, but is there anything I can do to improve this to something slightly more respectable?

I've uploaded a short .m2v clip (http://www.mediafire.com/?wwjmcdmwdmw) here that is representative of most of the problems.

Many Many Many thanks.

[Lyris]

This crap aliasing effect is used all the time on British TV to fake a "Film Look" from Video cameras. They shoot 50i then use garbage deinterlacing to cut the motion fluidity down to something that resembles a "filmic look". I think someone forgot to tell them Film doesn't look jaggy...

I wouldn't say the colour is washed out myself - it looks more like a stylistic choice to me.

It's also been captured/recorded (on a DVD recorder?) via Composite video. Using a DeRainbow filter might help with the coloured interference on the girl's sweater.

I'd also recommend adding fake grain to simulate the background noise that's been corrupted by compression and "cover over the gaps".

[scharfis_brain]

how was this mpeg created?
its luma is field discarded
and the chroma is blended.

[Umamio]

I'm thinking the original original probably didn't look toooo bad but I get the feeling everything seems to have been run through an NLE and resized to within "TV super-extra-safe zones" and the resizer was terrible. Maybe oversaturated rather than washed out, actually... Maybe both? Somehow.

Thanks for the Derainbow suggestion

My main problems are with the aliasing and the chroma artifacts on scene changes.

What plugin / script do you recommend for adding grain?

[Umamio]

I have no idea how it was made, the disc landed on my desk this week, it's part of a showreel, I get the feeling not very much care was taken in its creation.

Is there anything I can do about the blended chroma and lack of luma?

I can request an improved version but I get the feeling I will just get back a DVD with 100kbps of extra bitrate and no difference.

[scharfis_brain]

try to get a video from a stage before mpeg compression took place.
this would be the one chance to avoid blended chroma...

you can do this to clean up this source a bit.

mpeg2source("F:\forum\Umamio\HRBL.d2v",cpu=6)
nnedi(field=1)

but there is nothing to fix blended chroma except of getting a non-blended source.

[Mug Funky]

omfg that's gross.

the luma is gamma'd way up, the chroma seems to have been turned up quite a bit (like 200%).

i'm finding it difficult to reverse the effect - everything i try still looks unnatural.

i'm not sure i could even watch a show that looked this bad, even if it was comic genius. maybe if i adjusted the TV somewhat, or watched it at work patched through the grading suite and made adjustments on the fly...

[Umamio]

Thanks for the help! I knew it was a lost cause even before I posted, but I thought if I tried believing in the impossible and kept sending letters to father christmas someone might descend from the skies with a plugin or function unknown to mortal men who could perform acts of true video processing magicry and sprinkle fairy dust on my porridge.

This is the first time I have had a need for nnedi, though, another learning experience.