VHS cleanup/restoration

[Mediahead]

Not sure the correct topic to post this under, so move it if necessary..

This is just my experiments to make something recorded on VHS more watchable in the 21st century.
Since the footage was 24p, I am going for a film look here, and grain helps mask a lack of detail so I used that here.

Original VHS (encoded in MPEG-2)


My Cleanup:


I did some color correction, IVTC,  cropping out the parts the VHS rendered unusable, and used everyone's favourite boogeyman tool, AI Up-scaling to remove the compression artifacts from MPEG-2 and try to make the haloing/ringing a bit better. Let me know what you think

For those curious, the series I used for the comparison is The Chris Isaak Show. Not really my type of thing, but I was thinking of restoring it for my father and he only has it/it only seems to be available on a bootleg set sourced from VHS/Composite into DVD recorder recordings.

[spoRv]

I liked that show!

Cleanup: do you want my opinion? Sorry, don't like it... too soft, too dark, white becomes magenta... make one step at a time: cleaning, scaling, sharpening, color grading, grain plate - if you see that the first is right, proceed with the second and so on; compare also each step with the previous and the original; if you notice something wrong, you have only to go back one step, and not start from scratch!

[Mediahead]

Thanks ! most of the softness comes from the dehaloing, I just can't figure out how to try to make the halos better without destroying the image ):
everything being said, I'd love to restore this series for my dad since he obviously went through the lengths to get a bootleg of it, and if you enjoy it i can share it here too

[Mediahead]

make one step at a time: cleaning, scaling, sharpening, color grading, grain plate

Yep ! I seem to get better results when scaling first, before avisynth processing (other than IVTC of course)

[spoRv]