Filters and old B&W films

[rcjc]

I've been doing some xvid rips of old films lately. B&W full screen ones mostly and on 1CD if the movie is in the 90min or less range.

What I want to know is what filters have ppl found that work well on these older b&w films? What kind of experiences have you had with different filter combinations? I've mostly tried convolution3d on the LQ setting and low negative values with unfilter with undot thrown in. This usually gives me a softer image than I would like and seems to loose a lot of that graininess you see in older films but on the plus side it does give a smaller 1st pass.

so basicly I just wanna know what Avisynth 2.51 filters ppl like using on old films and which ones work well when encoding in xvid.

[cult]

greyscale()

[rcjc]

I remember trying that a while back but that didn't change the first pass size

or are you talking about a filter?

[cult]

its a function in avs.It turns your movie in b&w so it avoids chroma noise

[mf]

Originally posted by cult
its a function in avs.It turns your movie in b&w so it avoids chroma noise
But ruins the "old brown film tone" effect. You could paste an input frame from virtualdub into your favorite image editor though, and use the color selector on a grey-brown tone, and then use that for blankclip, like this:

MergeChroma(BlankClip(input, $AA9272))

(where input means your input clip)

[kilg0r3]

You can get the grain back in by using ffdshoe. so, you don't have to store it on cd. --- Ooopsi what a nice typo regarding ffdshow :D

BTW I'd try tom barry stmedian filter and undot

[crusty]

Plus the brownish or yellowish tint that the original has, might very well not be the same colour it originally had.
Celluloid films often discolour simply of aging.
So while what you see now is B&W with a yellowish tint, it could have started out as simple black and white.
Same goes for noise.

You can also encode the movie in grayscale in xvid.

But if you're asking about avisynth filters, you should have asked in the avisynth usage forum *hint*.

[mf]

Originally posted by crusty
Plus the brownish or yellowish tint that the original has, might very well not be the same colour it originally had.
Celluloid films often discolour simply of aging.
So while what you see now is B&W with a yellowish tint, it could have started out as simple black and white.
Same goes for noise.
Afaik the color depends on film type, however that I don't know for sure. The noise I do know for sure, it depends on the film type, and not aging. Still, the old brown tint is a nice thing to preserve. Normal greyscale looks so boring.

[rcjc]

thx, I'll try the stmedian filter and just in case, I won't mess with the color :)

[kilg0r3]

--> color: ffdshow can also adjust the hue of th out put :)

[crusty]

The noise I do know for sure, it depends on the film type, and not aging.
Well that's true, but also old films that were handled a lot or have been sitting in a dusty cabinet for 50+ years tend to have more noise, basically because all sorts of filth has had time to mess with the celluloid. :D
So, in an indirect way, you also get more noise with age. It's just not automatic.

And like Kilg0r3 said, you can adjust stuff with ffdshow.
I'd rather encode in grayscale to have better compressibility than having extra, basically useless colour information that I can just as well add with a postprocessing filter.

[mf]

a) there is barely a quality/filesize difference between color or no color.
b) there is even less quality/filesize difference if there is only one color throughout the whole movie. it will only have to be updated every keyframe, and even then it won't take much space.
So you can be safe with that brown tint, you won't notice any quality impairment.