LD HD Restoration

[bronan]

I've been putting together a workflow to make LD video a bit more palatable for 4K TVs. After discovering QTGMC I'm really impressed with its ability to deinterlace to 60FPS. I've only found a few artifacts I need to see if I can improve, but otherwise the fluidity is very impressive. Once deinterlaced I am running noise reduction via NeatVideo to reduce chroma noise and that ugly chunky video noise. Finally, the footage is brought into Resolve for color correction and film emulation. I know its a bit sacrilege to be using film grain on footage shot on video, but the detail is so low it really does a lot for your perception. I will have a 4K 60fps HEVC test track soon for anyone that wants to check it out, but here is a quick preview of Raw vs Processed. Its still a work in progress, but please let me know your thoughts.

Processing chain as of now:

1) Magewell captures as lossless 8-bit MagicYUV 4:4:4

2) Virtualdub2 (avisynth+ 64-bit script)
- for film inverse telecine with TIVTC (23.976fps), for video deinterlace with QTGMC (59.94 fps)
- reduce video noise (NeatVideo)
- crop
- upscale to 4K (nnedi3_rpow2)
- sharpen (LimitedSharpenFaster)
- add borders
- trim frames
- export to .mov ProRes 4:2:2

3) Resolve
- level & color adjustment
- film emulation (filmconvert)
- export to ProRes 4:2:2

4) simple x264 (avisynth+ 64-bit script)
- convert to 4:2:0
- create x265 hevc master

[PDB]

Looks good bronan. I'm also a big fan of QTGMC.

[spoRv]

Albeit the result is obviously better, I'd not upscale it more than 1080p (actually I'd stay at 720p to retain same details but saving a lot of space), and I'll let 24/25/60fps - again, IMHO!

About grain plate, noise reduction, color grading: go for it!

[bronan]

I don't disagree with you about the resolution, I guess my thought was that I am watching on a 4K TV that will just upscale it again anyhow so it is the difference? But really it comes down to hard drive space and encoding time I guess.. I am pretty sure this process would take at least 2 days straight on my machine between doing the initial Virtualdub export, Resolve export, and HEVC encoding.

[spoRv]

As I already attempted something like that, I noticed that upscaling laserdisc video more than 720p is futile - for 2160p time and space would increase up to 8x!

Unless you upscale using deep learning method; still, result could be... meh! and when it's right, it does not differ a lot from 720p upscaled with a TV set.

Sure, if you upscale to only 720p and then let the TV upscale it to 2160p, grain would be coarser than upscaling to 2160p and slap a grain plate on it, but what's the point to add 4K grain to a 480i/576i source?

Still, I strongly encourage you to make your tests and decide by yourself... hint: start with a short clip, so you can avoid days and days of encoding!

[HippieDalek]

Looks pretty impressive!

[bronan]

Still, I strongly encourage you to make your tests and decide by yourself... hint: start with a short clip, so you can avoid days and days of encoding!

That's exactly what I'm doing, cut out a 5 minute segment to work with I am going to do one more test between 1080p and 2160p and make a final call on it.

I also added another comparison shot to the top post. There's a little more black crush than I'd want but it was just a 5 second blanket grade for the entire clip

[spoRv]

Do not disregard 720p - it scales good on 1080p (1.5x) and perfectly (3x) on 2160p!

[deleted user]

Looks decent. I'd give AI upscaling a try too. It's usually not much of an improvement for far away objects but it can make close ups of faces and such look a lot nicer.

[bronan]

Looks decent. I'd give AI upscaling a try too. It's usually not much of an improvement for far away objects but it can make close ups of faces and such look a lot nicer.

I played around with Topaz Enhance AI but it tends to get that smeared look, reminds me of the Eagle and HQX filters for video game emulators. Do you know of any others worth checking out?