Thinking about purchasing video ai, still undecided

I’ve got both old 8mm film footage converted to DVD at Costco, the original 8mm film, and a box full of sony 8mm video tapes for sources.

I just bought the Topaz suit for images (gigapixel, sharpen, denoise) so I thought I’d take a look at the video option and downloaded the demo version. I didn’t get the email with instructions, so just closed the window to preview results with the watermark.

With various settings I did notice some difference, but not like I did with the imaging products and don’t know if it’s worth spending $300 on. I will play with the settings to see if I can improve the result, but hoping someone here can recommend the best settings for converted analog video

As an aside, I am thinking of reconverting the analog to digital by feeding the source into an upscaler what has component inputs and hdmi output, then out to a capture device that to USB stick or PC etc. Would this be a worthwhile exercise to improve the end result?

thanks in advance…

i might process you some short clips of your footage for test if you like that might make your decision easier. just upload some test files for me. :slight_smile:

One of the things to take into account is the film transfer. While, most film is at 24 fps, old 8mm can really vary. This becomes a problem with frame-sync and refresh rates.
I’d start in your non linear editor and work on color correction as the film has likely washed out. Start with finding a proper white balance, pedestal (black level) and then gamma/contrast.
Contrast can be changing from scene to scene on conversion of old film. You can additionally do a lot with a video De-noise such as Neat video. Then run the finished non-linear render through Topaz.
The better product you start with -the better the output through Topaz.

Hi, I work on 8 mm videos also dating from 96 to 2002, for 6 - 7 years, I deinterlace and apply some filters with hybrid to then do one or two passes with tvai :wink: forget deinterlacing with tvai for 8mm tapes , in any case for my case it works badly …

One thing I forgot to mention was I have converted quite a few 8mm videos to digital just by plugging my Sony camcorder into a DVD recorder via the RCA composite cables, pressing play on the camcorder & REC on the DVD recorder. When I talked about reconverting I was referring to my 8mm video, running it thru a cheap upscaler then into a capture device like an Avermedia with h264 built in - rather than my current direct to DVD method.

If I knew for sure I’d get better results I would do it. I may spend the couple of hundred $$ on the hardware & try it anyway.

I could upload some footage I have if someone wanted to give it a whirl with Topaz AI, I probably have some room on Dropbox or Google drive.

Hi, for having tried the RCA (the worst quality, the S-video, medium quality and the Firewire the best quality) I scanned in Firewire, with a PCI card that I bought about 60 euros and a camcorder that reads the 8mm Hi8 and Digital8 in LP or SP, 150 euros on eBay) :slight_smile: To do the video editing, on low resolutions like the (720 x 576 for my part) the best is to use the Firewire, and produce AVI files of 13 GB per hour :wink:

yes please

I want to see these samples as well;)

I put a short video in dropbox here - it’s from old super 8mm film converted to dvd at Costco.

It’s also on youtube here

Oh nice, classic “Moby Dick” Porsche racing. I give it a try even tough the source material has a very low quality. :slight_smile:

In a first step I reduce the video size to 352x288 with a converter of my choice to bring the pixel density closer to the detail density, enlarge it to 1280x720 via TVAI and try to reduce the glowing edges often seen in old footage like this. Also a 50 % stabilization is added and motion de-blur of course.

In the next step I shrink the 1280x720 video to 640x360 with a video converter of my choice and enlarge it to 1280x720 via TVAI again using motion de-blur and Artemies Medium Quality Halo to get the details a bit sharper. The beta version messed up a short scene du to the stabilization added btw.

and this is a comparison between the original footage and the final result:

The motion of the cars looks a bit jerkey maybe because of a none proper stabilization or frame interpolation, but we recovored details and make it look more natural again:

with stabilize and frame interpolation:

with no stabilize and no frame interpolation:

Thanks for all the work!

I have to say 3rd.mp4 is much more watchable, the stabilized version was very hard to watch.

The difference is quite noticeable, and touching up with Resolve 18 would make it even better.

I was hoping to have similar results to some of the real old film footage you see on youtube that has been upscaled to 4K (I’d be happy with clear 720p TBH) but I guess that process is a lot more intensive.

I wonder if I would get a better result by exporting the video as individual frames and getting an AI program to batch upgrade each frame individually (gigapixel ai?) then recompile into a movie. I believe this is how some of the super clear vintage films on youtube are done.

Perhaps my source footage in this case is just too poor as well, so that’s as good as it will get.

I tested that too with individual frames and Gigapixel but the result was not better. I agree that the old black and white, some fake colorized old 4 k movies probably had a better image quality from start. I don’t think we get more out of low quality source materials as seen in my examples. Anyway I would like to see if you get it improved even further!