Some Video Clean Up tools

[DjfunkmasterG]

Some people wonder how they can clean up their video to make it look a little better. Is the heavy digital grain getting on your nerves? Well you might want to look into a program called NEAT VIDEO. It cleans up footage pretty well, but you have to be careful as it can make your actors skin look like wax if not applied correctly, but it is definitely a nice tool to have in your arsenal, and it is available for Premiere, Avid, FCP and Vegas. http://www.neatvideo.com/ To update a little I am using this plug-in on DEADLANDS 2 to clean up a lot of the grain and noisy footage. It has increased render time from 2 hours and 10 minutes to 5 hours and 40 minutes using SD CBR MPEG2 24P WIDESCREEN. I haven't even attempted the Variable Bit Rate 2 Pass MPEG2 24P WIDESCREEN Render yet. However based on the CBR figures a normal VBR 2 pass used to take about 5 hours so I would think it would be closer to 10 hours with the whole movie being cleaned with NEAT. I am going to attempt the HD version Sunday Night. Normal HD render time for MPEG2 Blu-Ray 1920x1080 is 10 hours, so with using NEAT I am going to say it is most likely going to be 24+ hours to do a complete render. I will post some footage/screenshots before and after in the next few days

[DjfunkmasterG]

Here are the before and After Photos of the clean up work via NEAT VIDEO See attachments

[MinionZombie]

Grain isn't something that particularly bothers me, but the clean-up does look good.

[DjfunkmasterG]

Wait until i send you the final disc MZ and you see ho wmuch more amazing the PQ is, it is very close to HD especially when it is upscaled using my HD-DVD player.

[MinionZombie]

Wait until i send you the final disc MZ and you see ho wmuch more amazing the PQ is, it is very close to HD especially when it is upscaled using my HD-DVD player. *begins looking forward*

[DjfunkmasterG]

UPDATE on Rendering time. ok, so yesterday I did a VBR Two Pass at 9.5mbps using the MPEG 2 codec. With NEAT VIDEO applied to clean up the picture the film took 14 hours to render. Compared to the 6 hours it took for the CBR version. Right now I am doing the HD master for the distributor and it has been going at it for 9:43:40 so far and has 14:02:18 left so essentially 24 hours for an HD render.

[triste realtà]

Speaking of video tools, I have a VHS mpeg recorded at XP speed (amounting to around 5GBs) of Return 2 and it is from the orginal Lorimar tape, which is super blurry. Are there any sharpeners that give miraculous results? I have been looking into it and everybody says sharpening too much will cause artifacts and make the mpeg a mess, which I have seen first hand. I am going to try a whole slew of Vdub plugins tonight. I already tried Msharpen and asharp in AVIdemux, which is open source and easy to use for editing (joined the two mpegs perfectly) but only has a limited number of plugins. Recommend any software you want as everything is available in one form or another. I'm sure it would have been better to work on an AVI but I do not want to buy a capture card for one VHS.

[DjfunkmasterG]

Why are you going through the trouble of working on the video for Return 2? Just lift the video off the DVD release and the audio off the VHS and resync the audio with the DVD video and you then have a remastered and properly sounding copy of Return of the Living Dead 2

[triste realtà]

Believe me, that's right next on my list but the VHS and laserdisc feature the full frame version which has more vertical picture while the DVD has a slice more horizontal picture (and way better quality). I bought the tape just for the soundtrack and since I got it anyway, why not have both the full frame and the DVD with original soundtrack. The VHS has a vintage picture quality to it also which is an 80s nostalgia thing. I got OK results with the unsharp mask filter. The big problem is sharpening with interlacing and that filter has an interlaced material option in Virtualdubmod (I hope in Avisynth too). Also, the VHS had a green tint and I figured just reduce the green but the solution ended up being a boost to the blue. I am beginning to realize that hardware solutions would have worked better as people have said on video manipulation forums such as videohelp and doom9, like an analog sharpener.