I had a bunch of old 8mm home movies (40-50 years old) digitized and I’d love to be able to make them more watchable but after many attempts at trying to figure out settings and which model I have yet to make any headway in getting the footage to look any better. (I’m not expecting miracles but just better would be great)
Has anyone had any experience with this sort of original material and what settings/models did you have any luck with?
I’m attaching a screenshot of a frame from one movie.
First thing is give as much detail as to the digital format they were converted to.
You can use a tool like:
use Artemies strong de-halo or Proteus with a certain amount of de-halo. Beside this I have low hope in this. Maybe upload a snipped to test with?
@TomaszW spent long time on those presets including 8mm films.
you might want to give his presets a shot. I personally found on my 8mm films the 4k and 8k presets worked the best for me. give them all a shot.
you can test them all for yourself and preview them on TVAI and if you wish you could also use a compare tool to check the results to see for yourself if you notice any difference between the two (that would save you tons of time). or just playback the 2s / 5s preview you generate from both one right after the other to see if you spot any difference in quality.
Video-Compare - Video compare tool
Topaz Video AI v3.0: Working with multiple video files - YouTube - how to use preview mode
Here’s the details that MediaInfo gave:
Format : MPEG-4
Format profile : Base Media / Version 2
Codec ID : mp42 (isom/avc1/mp42)
File size : 254 MiB
Duration : 3 min 34 s
Overall bit rate : 9 934 kb/s
Movie_More : CarDV-TURNKEY
Encoded date : UTC 2017-01-14 01:24:33
Tagged date : UTC 2017-01-14 01:24:33
Origin : NVT-IM
Video
ID : 1
Format : AVC
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile : High@L4.1
Format settings : CABAC / 1 Ref Frames
Format settings, CABAC : Yes
Format settings, Reference frames : 1 frame
Format settings, GOP : M=1, N=15
Codec ID : avc1
Codec ID/Info : Advanced Video Coding
Duration : 3 min 34 s
Bit rate : 9 832 kb/s
Width : 1 440 pixels
Height : 1 080 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 4:3
Frame rate mode : Constant
Frame rate : 20.000 FPS
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.316
Stream size : 252 MiB (99%)
Language : English
Encoded date : UTC 2017-01-14 01:24:33
Tagged date : UTC 2017-01-14 01:24:33
Codec configuration box : avcC
I’m assuming this was an Supr 8 reel film.
The resolution of 1440 x 1080 and fps of 20 indicates the conversion used a really cheap scanner.
From the date of the file I can tell you a decant Lab scanner back then could have done 2k not 1080.
FYI: A decent lab scanner will run you around $40K a year over a 5 year lifecycle.
If you still have the tapes I’d suggest getting a re-scan from a decent company.
I’ve been restoring a 2002 VHS to DVD for the last year and have had to use many other tools aside from Topaz to get decent results.
I doubt Topaz on it’s own will give you a good result.
If you could send me a 60 second sample clip I’ll run it thro some of my methods to see what will work best for you if you can’t re-scan.
From the example picture and the resolution, I would say you need to downscale it to DVD resolution for TVAI to do much with it.
This is a good idea — I’m going to try that.
Sure would love to hear the results when you get them.
I too would love to hear if you made any progress on this!
