[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.

[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?

[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?

[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?

[Tim Leonard]

Thanks, its interesting reading.

My impression is that the professional solutions may offer a bit more automation and project management, but a lot of the techniques seem to be available in the Adobe suite already. The trick is, as you say, to have enough time to wait for it to happen.

I tried a demo of DeNoise plugin on b&w footage and it took care of 70% of the grain and dust issues (I’m guessing tweaking the settings and applying multiple passes would improved that percentage further).

However, boy did it take a long time (about 4.5 hours for five minutes of footage).

One of the challenges I’m running into with these various techniques is what order to apply various “fixes”. I suspect that the order effects are applied has a great bearing on the results, so part of my experimentation is to apply one or two changes, render/encode it out and do a split screen with the original footage. Once that solution is satisfactory, I will combine it with subsequent fixes. Hopefully at the end of these experiments I’ll come up with the best formula.

For others that may be following this thread here’s my workflow:

So far for black & white footage, I am removing any frame blending effects from the original transfer (16mm silent was 16fps, but the transfer bumped it up to 29.97fps HDTV rate) by changing the speed/duration to 200% in PrePro. Most of the time that did the trick, although stepping through some of the footage showed some frame removal on the wrong (frame blended) frame, so I adjusted that area by a percentage or so (no more than -5 or +5% from 200% speedup) to get it back in sync. I render that out and have a new 16fps (or close to it) master that I can use for frame by frame compositing, cleanup, tweening etc.

Once I finish all the corrections, I’ll change the speed/duration of all clips to 50% with optical flow (or perhaps Twixtor if that does a better job). Take a look at the rendered results and mark those parts that have optical flow artifacts and further tweak those bits before producing the final rendering/encoding.

Color will probably follow the same method, but it remains to be seen what technique will work best to restore the faded Chroma.

[Tim Leonard]

Thanks a billion (a million adjusted for today’s dollars).

Are you using EXR for any other reason other than as a lossless format?

In the AE file there’s a jpg called “which is better” is that just a before AE effects applied still?

Do you, or anyone else reading this, have any ideas regarding techniques or software that can “interpolate” the missing color channels using algorithms or example footage (i.e. my Super8 transfer)?

Food for thought. Perhaps teaching a plugin/utility what gray values in the original are which hue it could artificially add at least the right range of color. These “guesses” could be treated as layers and then further manually manipulated by the user ending up with a “recipe” for each scene.

I’ve been looking at Re: Match and it seems like it might be useful. Has anyone had any experience with that plug-in?

[Tim Leonard]

Wow that’s pretty good, as a start. Would you detail the steps to arrive at the result? My skills in AE are pretty weak so I’m not sure exactly what settings you’re referring to. If its easier, just send me the PrePro/AE files and I’ll dissect them. Thanks.

[Tim Leonard]

You mentioned earlier how you could recover 80% from magenta tinted footage. Would this work for me and if so would you describe how to do it?

[Tim Leonard]

Here’s a screen shot of my layout:

1. The super 8 rotoscope version transferred to HDAVI

2. The 16mm HDAVI transfer showing the loss of cyan and yellow

3. The result of the color blending of 1 & 2.

4. The effect applied to 1.

Here’s a link to a full size frame of 1. solo
super8transfer.jpg

Here’s a link to a full size frame of 2. solo
16mmtransfer.jpg

Here’s a link to a full size from of 1. color blended onto 2.
colorblend.jpg