Double DeBlend?

[Frank62]

I have more than one clip here that were treated really not so well:
It seems they are pulldowned to 29.97, then possibly blend-deinterlaced, and then blend-converted down to PAL, 25fp/s.
Before I load something up: Does anyone see any chance at all?
:thanks:

[johnmeyer]

SRestore can do a good job, but only on some video. You definitely need to supply a sample.

[Frank62]

I tried SRestore first. The best result it gave me with a simple

v=interleave(v,v)
v=SRestore(v,...)

But so far from perfect... I will upload a scene tomorrow, maybe you or someone has a better idea.

[johnmeyer]

I have no idea what to recommend until I see a sample. I've been doing this since the late 1990s, and I have seen dozens and dozens of completely different ways to screw up NTSC video, PAL video, and film transfers. This includes missing fields; duplicated fields; blended fields; inverted fields; scaling without deinterlacing first; etc.

It is a wonderful intellectual challenge to try to recover something from the mess that has been created, although often it is impossible.

AI promises to be able to recover unrecoverable video, although having seen some of the early results, they tend to be very bizarre, with lots of imagined detail added. As one example, I just used some free AI to recover detail from a 1984 first-generation VHS video that I took from an airplane. It converted the horizontal siding to vertical siding!! The rest of the detail was quite correct, and the result was, at first glance, much improved.

But, it was wrong. Note that in the AI-improved image, the siding on the gray two-story house is vertical when it is actually horizontal wooden siding.

Before:
https://i.imgur.com/ITuhSCj.jpeg

After:
https://i.imgur.com/fkk8PGR.jpeg

[rgr]

The car looks interesting on the road :)

[Frank62]

I uploaded a scene. It's from a classic colorized movie, that had been aired exactly like this on German tv, station TNT. I wonder if there is a better NTSC master for this, even VHS would be better.
https://we.tl/t-WEOD2ptyJRQ7XnpB

[gispos]

@johnmeyer, the result is truly impressive, what kind of AI was used to create this?

[johnmeyer]

@johnmeyer, the result is truly impressive, what kind of AI was used to create this?I simply uploaded a single frame to the free version of ChatGPT and asked it to improve the detail.

[pbristow]

I uploaded a scene. It's from a classic colorized movie, that had been aired exactly like this on German tv, station TNT. I wonder if there is a better NTSC master for this, even VHS would be better.
https://we.tl/t-WEOD2ptyJRQ7XnpB

Given that the resolution of that clip is 640x480, I would assume it was resized from the (some-width-or-other)x576 by whoever captured it from the German TV channel. That in itself will have munged the two fields together, so your first step in processing probably needs to be to try to get pack to a proper PAL resolution. That won't *un*-munge the fields, but will at least any subsequent steps to recover something life the "original" (i.e. as televised) fields a fighting chance, and from there you can either try to get back to the original frame rate, or make do with something that at least has the right moments in time getting displayed in the right order (with natural persistence of vision helping your eyes compensate for fact that a frame often lingers on screen while the next one is appearing)... even if not with the ideal frame timings.

Of course, if there was any mixture of cropping *and* resizing involved, then getting back to a sane resolution for further processing may be impossible.

(I'm assuming in all of the above that the German broadcast was in fact in PAL, or it's direct digital equivalent - i.e. 576 lines interlaced at 25 fps/50 fields per second - rather than being a more modern transmission in HD.)

[Frank62]

The resizing was done at last on a totally blended source. Sorry, but I don't have the original 720x576 capture any more. But I know the airings very well, it is not the first time, I have to handle these.

When intact interlacing of any kind is incorrectly resized as you said, it looks different: You have stacks of blended lines alternating with normal lines. @johnmeyer knows these.
In these cases I would try some un-resizing to reconstruct the fields somehow, but here everything is 100% blended - also the original in 720x576 was. Sorry that I have no recording in the original size, they are all lost unfortunately.

The very best would be, to find NTSC-masters of these in the 80ies and 90ies colorized movies, with intact field structures, even VHS would work.

[Emulgator]

Frank62, Public German TV is required to keep all broadcasts stored.
You may apply for a copy and if IIRC you will get a DVD, costing 50€ (was 15 years ago).

[Frank62]

You are (were) right. Some tv stations had this service, now there is only one left, one of the biggest (ZDF) stopped this by the end of 2025.
But on most tv stations you could only get movies, where ALL rights were with the station, own productions. Some were a bit more accomodating (like ZDF), but movies like these you could never get from them.
And the airings were on German TNT, a branch, that doesn't exist any more of the American Turner - so no chance at all, but thanks for your help.

SRestore worked quite ok... So I am not happy but it is not SO bad.