Best setting for upconverting DV footage?

Hello everybody. Based on your previous experience with Video Enhance AI 2.4, what would be the best setting to use for upconverting old interlaced 480i29.97 video to full HD 1080. I have these talking head interviews I filmed 20 years ago with my old Sony VX2000. Here are some screen grabs of the subjects:

12%20PM 44%20PM 28%20PM

Thank you in advance for your help / feedback.

Dione TV v3

Hi Viktorz3008 and thanks for your help. Unfortunately Dione TV results in playback at 50% speed and frame rate being doubled from 29.97 to 59.94. Same issue encountered with Dione DV. But not Dion DT.

What input format are you using? MP4 MKV MOV something like that?

The source file is a Quicktime Apple ProRes 422 with ā€œ.movā€ extension.

I usually convert any other formats to mp4 before upscaling to avoid framerate issues. Maybe you will want to try that out.

Thanks again for your help viktorz3008. Iā€™ll definitely try that. Iā€™m getting excellent results with Proteus 6. I havenā€™t heard anyone mention Proteus. Iā€™m hearing a lot about Dion and Artemis, but not so much about Proteus. Strange because Iā€™m getting the best results so far with it. But Iā€™m a total newbie with this software, so i very much appreciate your help. :slightly_smiling_face:

No worries. I personally hate Dione models the most due to artifacts. But at least itā€™s sharper than any deinterlacer I know so far. Proteus is what I really like and want it to be better. Proteus is the future of VEAI Iā€™m sure about it.

Iā€™m not sure this should be happening, the frame rate should double, but playback should still be 100%

Technically, doubling of the frame rate is correct as the second field should be shown half a frame after the first field.

Personally, Iā€™ve had the best success by doing it in two passes;

  1. Pass 1 - Dione DV 100% to sort out the interlace without changing the content as much as DTV
  2. Pass 2 - A different model for up scaling, the model varies based on the content.

Hi Mark, thanks for your help as well. I donā€™t understand why Dione DV and Dione TV are doing that. But i read that Video Enhance AI recommends de-interlacing footage prior to bringing it into its program.

Regarding de-interlacing before upscaling, I donā€™t see an option for that in the Video Enhance AI user interface. Or am I missing something? Do you recommend de-interlacing in another program prior to bringing my clips into Video Enhance AI? If so, can you recommend one? I know that Final Cut Pro can do it. Should I use that instead?

No, I should have been clearer, Itā€™s two separate runs with VEAI.

Regarding de-interlacing; thatā€™s what Dione DV or Dione TV are doing in step 1; changing the 29.97fps Interlaced video to a 59.94fps progressive video.

Then in step 2 you load the new file produced and upscale it with whatever model works best.

edit:

I notice in another post, you had a question about inverse telecine.

For this I use Handbrake.

While it has detelecine options, these donā€™t always work so instead, I turn all filters off and set the output FPS to 23.976, somehow it figures out which frames to remove and works 99% of the time. This function would be done before step 1 above.

I didnā€™t mention this before as it doesnā€™t apply to footage you shot yourself.

So to summarise;

Step 0 (if needed), Remove telecine with Handbrake
Step 1, VEAI - Convert Interlace Video to Progressive Video with Dione DV or TV (at 100%)
Step 2, VEAI - Upscale Progressive Video with model of your choice.

Thanks very much Mark. In Handbrake, to remove ā€œtelecineā€, should the settings be this?

or this?

Not the second one as it is using deinterlace, you want to use VEAI for that job.

You can try with the first one to see if it works, I have not had much success with this. I normally set everything to off and then set the output frame rate to 23.976

I would suggest trying both on a small clip and comparing the results, what works for me might not be whatā€™s best for you.

(sadly Iā€™m not allowed to post screenshots :frowning_face:)

Hi Mark, thanks very much for your continued help with this.

Iā€™d be happy to share the file Iā€™m testing: 3 quick cuts of interviews (in French and German) totaling 60 seconds. But it doesnā€™t look like I can upload it here on this forum.

I only have the watermark trial version of VEAI. I wanted to see how good VEAI is at upconverting and also how long it would take on my 2014 iMac to upconvert 1 minute of SD video to full HD. I first tried on my old 2012 iMac (with a 2GB GPU) and was getting a very sluggish 2 seconds per frame which seemed to be taking forever (60 minutes to encode only 1 minute). But then I tried on my newer 2014 iMac (with a 4GB GPU) and it seemed to be at least 4x faster (0.4 seconds per frame). It actually upconverted the same 60 second clip in just 8 minutes!

Iā€™m really tempted to buy right now, but I discovered that last Black Friday 2020, Topaz Labs was offering its entire set of programs for the same price as VEAI alone ($299). Iā€™m dying to to get to work with it right now, but that Black Friday offer makes it very tempting to wait.

Hi everyone
I have this program on recently, I am browsing the forum for the best tips. I have a lot of material from the DV era. These are captured 720x576i AVI files. @ 25fps @ 24.4Mb/s bitrate.
I would like to edit these in Premiere improving the quality a bit (I know the SISO ruleā€¦ - s* in s* out). I see that since the previous tips it is already possible to do deinterlace and upscale at one time (Deinterlace footage and upscale to HD). In addition, I still set the Stabilization option (Full frame, value=10). In the end, my settings are as follows:

IN 720-576 (1.07:1 SAR) @ 25 fps
OUT 1920x1080 (FHD), Original Pixel Type, Crop to Fill, 50 FPS (2x Deinterlaced) + Stabilization Full Frame, Strength=10).
Output Prores 422LT, MOV.

Am I doing it right?

You didnā€™t mention the AI model you use.

I found with my old DVD PAL interlaced sources or even VHS footage that Iris is by far the best model to use. It really does an excellent job at tidying up lines/stripes and also chroma noise.

Remember to set ā€žRecover original detailsā€œ to a high value (80+%) and I like to have the Antialiasing/Deblur also quite high (+60% or higher).

Great advice, thank you very much. I had the default setting on Dione DV 2x FPS but there is no option to manually tune parameters there. Comparing Dione vs Iris with your parameters the winner is definitely Iris.

Is the export to Prores 422LT a good solution? With Sony A7 422 10bit files, I transcode everything to 422LT or 422HQ because itā€™s easier to work in Premiere afterwards but isnā€™t such old material (DV 25 Mbps) enough for mp4 x.264? Does it make a difference?

I ask so many questions is I have a lot of material from the DV era to work with. I plan to make family chronicles from each year, so the whole thing first wants to prepare for editing and set a standard.
Therefore, any additional advice is greatly appreciated on me.

Thank you very much for your time.

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If you have the space go with ProRes. For my needs (upscaling old mostly music concert DVDs to FullHD) I for simplicity use H264 high with a high bitrate of 120Mbps which is sufficient quality wise - but then I donā€™t do further post processing in Premiere on the files but just shrink them afterwards with Handbrake using H265 and CQ24. No quality loss I can see with this approach.

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Dione:DV is the best.
it works the best for my DV videos (720x480x29.97fps).
I tried so many variants including what was suggested here and nothing was able to beat the Dione:DV for Sony DV videos I have.

So Iā€™m a newbie, and I was trying Dione:DV on my old DV films, and Iā€™m under the impression that both Dione and Proteus do similar enhancements to the video, so I was thinking its not necessary to use Proteus after Dione DV has been already used to upscale to 1920x1080 cause its so good looking. I also noticed that the Dione preset has included, in addition to deinterlacing, both upscaling to full hd and frame interpolation to 2x frame rate. Iā€™ve been keeping resolution at the original 720x576 while running Dione DV. I do believe the results are better for Dione with upscale to full hd. I also think Artemis works well after Dione DV, but I wouldnā€™t use it for Dione TV and interlaced 480p NTSC video, because it seems to over-sharpen with some tv films. So I personally prefer Dione DV and Dione TV upscale to full hd and 2x frame interpolation over trying some other deinterlacing methods and maybe using Proteus or Artemis medium.
I have also tried combining Dione DV 720x576 result with Proteus full hd upscale. I noticed trying the manual settings for Proteus to enhance to 1920x1080 the settings changed with every camera angle of the DV video apparently depending on distance from people, cars, buildings, trees, or water in the image. So I played with an old DV video which I enhanced after Dione DV with Proteus in parts to 1920x1080, with different settings based on what was being filmed at what distance (revert compression, recover details), and joined all the 30 parts together, and it looked great to me. I do not know if this is necessary, and as a newbie I was wondering if Proteus with auto settings varies its settings automatically in different parts of the film, or do the settings remain the same over the entire duration for every frame?

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