Color restoration project on Regular 16mm film transfer

[Chris Wright]

I also made a 16-24fps and 18-24fps frame blend script with edit detection that will only frame blend every other frame. and it will shut off when it sees an edit so you don’t get “gloop”. I’m surprised Adobe doesn’t have this feature built it.

it has a lot less artifacts than twixtor/timewarp, although you can use splines to help twixtor/masks for timewarp, you’re pretty much gonna end up rotoscoping anyway. Whatever framerate conversion you choose, it should be the very last step.

https://f1.creativecow.net/10063/ae-custom-5050-opacity-frame-blend-with-autofps-and-scene-detect-cs6-working

[Tim Leonard]

Thanks again. I’m going to try test renderings of Twixtor vs. Optical Flow, vs. your AE method.

One thing I do see already with some of the ReVision plugins, is that they make it easy to use my GPU to speed things up. I find that since I have an ATI/AMD GPU, its hit and miss what gets sped up in many cases. Next time I buy a PC I’ll stick with nVidea hardware.

I have a nVidea card in an older PC, but its really only good for some Media Encoder work (perhaps this project during a final pass).

I wish it were easy to set the second PC as a render server for Media encoder without having to copy all the source files over first. Adobe should work on getting that together so that rendering can be distributed among servers like in 3d work freeing up the editing machines to do the manual stuff. Do you know of any solutions to hand Media Encoder renderings to secondary PC’s?

[Chris Wright]

AE can network render image sequences, then simply reimport into AME for final output

https://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/installing-after-effects-cc-render-engines-with-adobe-creative-cloud/

quick video how to setup AE multimachine network render
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDJO380VQok

There is no premiere or AME render farm solution yet, but if you wanted, render out different parts of the premiere timeline as custom sequence on different computers with shared network folder.

[Tim Leonard]

Oh well, after following your suggestions about multimachine rendering in AE, I found out that the most recent version doesn’t support it anymore and according to the link below

https://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/features-not-available-in-after-effects-cc-2015-13-5/

It probably won’t be coming back.

I’m quickly running into multiple slowdowns with a lot of these techniques which makes me think of which are most important.

I’m finding Twixtor less helpful due to its inability to lengthen the duration of the clips slowed back down to the final frame rate within the original sequence. Its confusing to do the embedded sequence workaround especially when other effects are applied. I’ll refocus on the final frame rate slowdown later since as you said its at the end anyway. Optical Flow could suffice, if I figure out how to better control the anomalies.

DeNoise does a good job making the black & white footage less grainy and dirty. I will have to do some AE rotoscoping too but, as the docs say its a good first rinse for dirt removal. Optical Flow and Twixtor do a great job making the film look smoother, so that’s definitely worth the added time involved. deFlicker doesn’t add enough benefit to the look so I think that’s out.

One thing that show’s up is uneven exposure and fading which looks like a weaving in and out of overexposed to underexposed vertical areas on the left and right of the image. I think this may have been accidental exposure when my grandfather removed the film from the camera for processing, although it could be age related.

My first thought is to find a way to adjust the levels (perhaps with a gradient mask to return the overexposed parts closer to normal). Hopefully with Bezier curves the changes will not introduce additional flicker. Is there am effect that can do this? I noticed that the AutoLevels effect does have a temporal setting, so perhaps it can average out the levels over the coarse of the weaving. Any ideas there?

[Chris Wright]

1. AE 2014 can open AE 2015 projects. you can easily download previous adobe versions so I don’t see a problem there.

2. RE deflicker fixes rolling bands and flicker
https://revisionfx.com/products/deflicker/

3. does the exposure change like a square of brightness moving across the image?

[Tim Leonard]

I didn’t know that AE 2014 could open 2015 files, I’ll look into that, especially to speed up some of your AE recepies.

The fading looks more like a pin-cushion effect with the negative of the pin-cushion showing the fading.

Doing a quick levels adjustment brings back some detail, but I’m not sure if its to weird looking in the end, even with masking etc. Just want to make sure that I’m not overlooking a simpler or quicker solution. Again, I’ve got to be practical as to what’s worth the effort and rendering time to do versus the result.

I’ll look into the deFlicker again on some sample footage. To be fair to ReVision, I’m sure if I wasn’t working just with the demo and had a budget and time to really understand how to use the tools at their best, I might get better results. Its just that at the moment my tests with their plug-ins take about 1 hour per minute of footage, so its not quick evaluating whether they’re worth it.

Have you had any experience comparing ReNoise to the built in noise reduction methods from Adobe? I normally don’t use them since applied quickly the results soften and loose too much detail, but perhaps they can do a similar job to ReNoise and I can save a few bucks?

[Chris Wright]

neatvideo is better/faster/cheaper $74vs99

neatvideo has optimize function to render faster and gives better results without blurring.
denoiser doesn’t multithread very well as you have probably found out.

the pincushion effect moves? i’m just trying to imaging a simple distortion that could be alpha’d out in AE as shift effect lightness, then again, I don’t know what it looks like.

You could probably make a simple AE script that averages 5 adjacent frames’s lightess level and mattes parts of frames in combination with my auto flicker repair template or read how RE-delicker removes rolling bands which is way more complicated.

In essence, reverse engineer it:

It would probably be 10 duplicate layers offset in time, on top of each other-precomped over and over again till a final luminance survives with, probably a standard deviation to remove errors(ie. camera moving or new scene), then just add/subtract brightness as an adjustment layer alpha matted.

[Tim Leonard]

I’ll check out neat video, hopefully it’ll work with film grain and dust rather than digital noise.

Regarding the pin cushioning, it definitely moves, more like a “breathing” rhythm. But the pincushion does not change axis just breathes in and out. The fade level varies, so its definitely a analyze how far off the negative cushion areas are from the middle (which may be well exposed). Anyway, I’ll put that on the back burner for now. Thanks again for all your help. I wonder if anyone else reads this thread? I was hoping others who’ve done some restorations of their own would share their experiences.

[Chris Wright]

here’s another plugin you can compare for that exposure problem.

digital anarchy’s flicker free
https://www.digitalanarchy.com/Flicker/main.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxE8d3IZyds

Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!

This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Google Youtube” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.

[Neil Block]

Hi Chris — do you happen to have these files that you originally uploaded here? I’m trying to do the same red tinted 16mm color removal as Tim but the files are no longer available. It’s a long shot but I’d love to get the AE settings you used to restore color here. Thank you!