Newbie needs advice for old DVD rip

desmo-rob · April 5, 2026, 9:50pm

Hi all, I have some old DVD rips of an old motorsports event from 1984 shot originally on consumer gear and burnt to dvd which was ripped and given to me. It is pretty low quality but I imagine can be improved somewhat (no idea how much), but i have no clue how to start as I am new video restoration. there are quite a few artifacts and uneven color distortion. Example frame shown below. How best to proceed and how much improvement can I expect? I’d like to at least be able to read the rider numbers ideally (not likely in this screenshot … other frames have much more to work with).

AND-E · April 6, 2026, 2:35am

Hi. Desmond.

Here’s a reply from Margaux at Topaz Support to someone asking a similar question which includes few links

Roadmap for a bloody ignorant with very, very old (but converted) video material

Which model to start with: For family footage like yours, I’d recommend starting with either Proteus or Iris. These are our core enhancement models and are great for improving overall clarity, reducing noise, and sharpening older footage without requiring a lot of manual adjustment. Both have an automatic mode that will analyze your footage and apply settings on its own, so you won’t need to tweak anything manually if you don’t want to.

If you try those and feel like the results could be better, Starlight Mini is worth exploring as it can produce more impressive results on older footage. However, your AMD Radeon RX6600 doesn’t meet the minimum system requirements to run Starlight locally. The good news is you have cloud credits, which means you can run Starlight through our cloud rendering service instead without needing to upgrade your hardware.

Here are a couple of resources to help you get started:

Here is our Quick Start Guide for Topaz Video as you get started with the app, which includes descriptions of each filter’s use case and video tutorials.

Additionally, here is a Topaz Video overview video.

And here’s a couple of video about upgrading Loe Quality and VHS Videos

Hope this helps

SkyDude · April 6, 2026, 5:44am

The very first thing I would do, would be to get it properly deinterlaced externally using QTGMC… That would remove the visible lines and give you the original 60/50 FPS (actually fields per second), which is the most optimal, especially for such fast-paced stuff.