I’m looking at my family’s digitized compact / SVHS home movies from the 80s, and am wanting to find the best way to bring them into the modern era. Naturally, I’d like them to come out at 4K, but what I’m really after is a way to remove the tracking streaks that are so common at the beginning and end of digitized VHS videos, while also ensuring that it doesn’t turn the body of the video into a smearly oil painting as a result of overly aggressive model usage.
Those of you who have done this, what are your favorite models / parameters & workflow?
Thanks very much for taking the time to read, and any information you guys might have to proffer
The short answer is: Topaz doesn’t offer anything batter than other non-AI enhancements at this time.
(Some might argue that the Iris model is better, but my experience with it is that it is gimmicky. As in, It can make faces really clear, so much so that they don’t look like they should be part of the rest of the video… or it will add random eyes and teeth. It also finds faces where there are none.)
For the most part, after I have spent a day or two finding the best settings that enhance more than mess things up, my VHS videos look about the same as before the enhancement, but are several gigabytes larger.
For VHS and SVHS your best option is probably the Dione TV Models as a starter but maybe keep original size or only 2x upscale initially, then using GAIA for a more natural looking upscale. I think you are being overly optimistic going for 4k from those sources, 1080p at most would be the best option. For tracking noise you have 2 options generally, crop the image to remove it depending how far up from the bottom is affected or use something else. Personally for noise I use Neat Video plugin within Davinci Resolve but any software can only deal with so much. Artemis may work as well to some degree but personally I steer away from Proteus and Iris as they remove too much detail with aggressive denoising even when turned back to zero. It’s all really dependent on the quality of the original footage as is everything.
Dione TV at same resolution creates to much blur, x2 doesn’t, no idea why it’s like that but it is.
Dione DV is ok at the same resolution, same as using it at x2, it doesn’t introduce extra blur if processed at the same resolution like Dione TV does.
On my content I noticed Neat video denoise removes details more then Nyx (Relative Auto with Dehalo set to -100, the rest at “0”) and doesn’t do such a great job like Nyx. so I wouldn’t rush into using Neat Video.
I did find that using Hybrid MCDegrainSharp Or TemporalDegrain2 does pretty good job and not much details are lost. it keeps it very close to original video appearance.
I started upscaling in Hybrid using the combination of Deinterlace (QTGMC) EZDenoise 1.20, Final Temporal smoothing = 1 + MCDegrainSharp (default setting) and Upscaling x2 using Lanczos (all in one process), and I must say, the results are really not bad. also it keeps the original look and feel of the video and most details are retained.
Hybrid is free, Neat Video isn’t but has a lot more control on how much you denoise and is made specifically for denoising and removing artifacts plus some cleanup such as tracking. Both programs have their uses. As i said it really depends how clean your original footage is but any denoising is a compromise between removing the noise and retaining detail in any software so always go with the least you can get away with to retain quality.
Yes it took me 100 years to find out that you always need to use interlaced even after using a hardware mp4 encoder from vhs to mp4 VHS from 95 camcorer model 92
I tried every Fxx combination then used DIONE TV v4 why it says it is for ANALOGUE cam corders and for the first time I see a soft not oversharped picture and I used as secondary iris v1 2 X
I use to minimize artifacts and no sharpness gets introduced Proteus v2 and iris mq keep the slider left
It looks as if the original topaz developers were different but better than the current ones why do Lq1 and proteus perform better than newer models on old digitized vhs tapes
