Reverse Standards Conversion Help?

[tygerbug]

Hello there. Over the past two years, Emulgator and I have done a lot of work restoring animated work by Richard Williams for TheThiefArchive (on Youtube). Emulgator uses Avisynth, mainly, to filter the material, improving quality, so that I can then do all the restoration work in Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, AfterEffects and so on.

But he's been pretty busy lately, and I've given him a lot of NTSC to PAL material to figure out for other restoration projects. It's clear that we could use some additional help if anyone's interested. (This is not paid work, for any of us.)

I'm running into a lot of material that was originally shot at 25p or 50i PAL, and is now running at 29.976i NTSC. Sometimes the NTSC quality is quite good, being Blu-Ray, official DVD, or at least laserdisc.

This material needs to be "Reverse Standards" converted back to PAL or 24p. The interlacing needs to be unpicked, original frames and fields found with duplicates discarded, and so on. And the final product needs to look better rather than worse.

It's tricky work, I know that. I'd love to be able to try to do it myself, but I am working on OSX and there don't seem to be many options here.

I have used ffmpeg for file format conversions, though I had to be told what to type in.

You can contact me at gilchristgarrett (at) gmail.com.

[johnmeyer]

Check your email ...

[tygerbug]

Anyone else then? I really need help.

[Guest]

Did you have a specific technical question, or are you just looking for volunteers for your project?

[johnmeyer]

As indicated in my previous post, I corresponded with him via email. He is asking for volunteers, and I was willing to help, but he has a large number of videos, each with different problems, some of them not directly related to standards conversion. I've looked at all that he sent, and some of them can be almost completely fixed, whereas others may be more difficult. I was willing to help until I found out that it was a lot more than just one or two videos.

My advice for this thread would be to pick one single video that is most important, or most difficult (or some other criteria), and get some advice on that one. After that is fixed, if the same technique doesn't work or doesn't apply to another video, then repeat the process.

It is very difficult to solve multiple problems on multiple videos in one thread.

[tygerbug]

I've struggled with Avisynth (to put it mildly!), not only because the scripting language can be difficult to understand, but because I'm running Macintosh OSX (10.8.2), on a Hackintosh, and of course Avisynth and VirtualDub are Windows programs.

I am able to run VirtualDub (1.9.11) on this system through Wine, including most plugins, and it seems to work. I installed AviSynth 2.5.8 but it does not work. I wrote a simple .AVS script to load some footage and I get the error "AVI Import Filter error: (unknown) (80040154)"

Is it known whether Avisynth can work on OSX through Wine or not? It's sad that OSX users are so ignored when it comes to this sort of software.

I do a lot of "rare" video restoration, and the video comes in a wide variety of formats, from very poor quality VHS to LD to DVD to Blu-Ray. There's a variety of problems which have to be dealt with and I'd love to be using Avisynth to deal with them, since there seems to be no real alternative.

Unless there is an alternative.

I am a filmmaker, not a programmer, and trying to understand scripting and command-line commands breaks my brain after awhile.

I have been working heavily with (the extremely talented) Emulgator for the past year and a half. He's been our Avisynth man on our restoration of the film The Thief and the Cobbler.

He's been a bit busy lately, and I know I'm burying him in (unpaid) work. So we really need new help, a new hand to help filter the material. I'm working on two different projects right now which both involve a lot of footage from different, unusual sources.

I'm running into a lot of material that was originally shot at 25p or 50i PAL, and is now running at 29.976i NTSC. Sometimes the NTSC quality is quite good, being Blu-Ray, official DVD, or at least laserdisc. Sometimes it is amazingly bad. It's usually rare material, or part of a larger project containing rare material.

This material needs to be "Reverse Standards" converted back to PAL 25p or 50i. The interlacing needs to be unpicked, original frames and fields found with duplicates discarded, and so on. And the final product needs to look better rather than worse.

It's tricky work, I know that. (And unpaid.) I'd love to be able to try to do it myself, but I am working on OSX and there don't seem to be many options here.

I don't like posting the actual video we're working on, but here's examples of the sort of thing we're dealing with.

I have a bunch of clips like this, which are progressive PAL 25fps interlaced to 29.97. Should be simple-ish, but I don't know how to do it without AviSynth. Or with AviSynth, at the moment.

Bonzos - Cylindrical Etc.vob (254.1 MB)
https://mega.co.nz/#!IEFliB5A!OxsbkR0X_LQ6nKwCJZITU0svILt6J-uzQ3sumjxvkLc

It all needs to be edited together as a compilation on a PAL DVD, so it can't be NTSC.


This was a laserdisc of a quite old conversion...
MonsterMakerClip.vob (69.0 MB)
https://mega.co.nz/#!9B8l0JDS!Ag3EOkKQw88a1YTvJYHgFiWMRidALpybWUhcmUlAhvM

"It appears to have blended field issues and I think can be restored with the AVISynth SRestore function." - JohnMeyer


Bonzos-EquestrianEchoPsych.vob (122.4 MB)
https://mega.co.nz/#!lFEhQBLT!NKS1ehGR894d_fQgi1n4QFOop8Nejg6gH0TyEe4MQxQ

"Simply has every fifth field repeated and should be trivial to restore back to 50i." - JohnMeyer


Here's something from an NTSC Blu-Ray, including progressive PAL and interlaced PAL clips.

DeathCab4CutieBRExtras3.mov (377.3 MB)
https://mega.co.nz/#!UAF0XT6A!FajiThrKJ_1vA1Gzoey5cgi6CQ1QKhHJNxzBvq4_Yz4



This clip is of notoriously poor quality. It's unknown whether a better quality copy still exists.

bonzos apollo better rip.mpeg (125.5 MB)
https://mega.co.nz/#!9IMk2SxQ!TkJHWDVBm2nyedLQJt7QrhM7ug0x144TnBZR7y4ss-Q

JohnMeyer successfully removed the objectionable flicker from another version of this clip, as follows:


For the mild flicker, I first use CNR2, and old chroma tool from VirtualDub to get rid of some of the chroma flicker. I then use Deflicker, which was designed to remove periodic flicker from lousy captures of amateur film, using a video camera pointed at a projector. Here are some settings that worked with your bonzos apollo.vob clip:


fixed_fields=fixed_fields.deflicker(debug=false,info=false,scene=200,percent=60,lag=25,lmax=225,lmin=20,\
noise=10,border=24)

I then used MDegrain2 on the separatefields() version of the video (i.e., treating it as interlaced), with blocksize = 8, overlap=2, and dct=1. The latter provides a big deflicker reduction. Here are the relevant sections to the script:

super = fixed_fields.MSuper(pel=2, sharp=1)
backward_vec2 = super.MAnalyse(isb = true, delta = 2, blksize=blksize, overlap=overlap, dct=dct)
forward_vec2 = super.MAnalyse(isb = false, delta = 2, blksize=blksize, overlap=overlap, dct=dct)
backward_vec4 = super.MAnalyse(isb = true, delta = 4, blksize=blksize, overlap=overlap, dct=dct)
forward_vec4 = super.MAnalyse(isb = false, delta = 4, blksize=blksize, overlap=overlap, dct=dct)

MDegrain2(fixed_fields,super, backward_vec2,forward_vec2,backward_vec4,forward_vec4,thSAD=400)

[Guest]

He's been a bit busy lately, and I know I'm burying him in (unpaid) work. So we really need new help, a new hand to help filter the material. Well, it seems two people so far have balked at doing a lot of unpaid work for you. Can't you get a windows system to complete this project using some your own efforts?