There is nothing I know of to obtain good results with underexposed stuff. You just can't restore what isn't there in the first place.

JJK

@JJKizak,

+1

Scanning dark film is almost impossible.

Hi guys,

Thanks for your responses, and apologies for my delay in getting back to you.

First of all, I don't bear any illusions that Sony Vegas can create data where there is no data :-), but my hope was there might be some "tricks of the trade" that could help make bad footage more viewable. Perhaps others dealing with the ungrateful task of transferring and archiving old often deficient home movie footage might have some ideas/guidelines.

Starting with following raw scanned footage:

I messed around for the longest time and was finally able to get this:

Not great, but certainly more viewable. Other than trial and error, I am simply trying to find out if there are any general practices/ideas/hints that could help make this a more predictable process.

Any help appreciated.

Dennis

Well, you have a lot more in the film original than I might have expected so that's not too bad a start point😊. For the rest it is really a matter of playing around with the options I mentioned earlier although you may also want to add a bit of colour correction, either secondary or the main one, and saturation which might well help as well. Certainly the methods I have suggested have worked reasonably well for me with similar images but I;m afraid I can't suggest a formulaic approach as you requested as there are so many variables at work. It really is a matter of trial and error as you learn what works for your particular images --- and a lot of patience as well!

Richard

Search for johnmeyer's channel on YouTube and his older restoration discussions on this forum. He's simply the best preservationist around.

Nice job on the clip though - - I might not soften it quite so much and leave "some" grain - - look into a plugin called NeatVideo.

Thanks guys - I should have mentioned that Neat was part of the mix here applied after Levels and Color Correction (including gamma and saturation)

Curious-- how does it look with NeatVideo first in the chain?

If you have the appetite to learn AviSynth you'll have access to a lot of powerful, free tools for restoration. This thread is where you'll find John Meyer and other gurus discussing the subject. Be warned, it's heavy and you could spend days/weeks/months/years mucking about with it. https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=144271

Curious-- how does it look with NeatVideo first in the chain?

I have played around with NeatVideo on my 8mm scans too and it doesn't look good if you put it in front in the chain.

NeatVideo can swallow details that you can't bring back later with a B&C or CC FX. I actually render first to XDCAM and than apply NeatVideo. I am now tinkering with smart upscale first, than correction and last NeatVideo... no result yet but will let you know.

In response to Musicvid: I did try dragging Neat up front without making any other changes and the result was even more blurry than the result I posted, although the coloring (I guess predictably) remained unchanged.

My theory with placing Neat towards the end of the chain is that color and gamma corrections can introduce a change (often increase) in the graininess, so Neat should be applied after these corrections to give the best possible degraining.

OldSmoke has other reasons for the same approach which sound valid as well.

Nick: thanks for the AviSynth link - I will have a look, but with the somewhat limited time I have available for this endeavor will probably be sticking with Sony Vegas Pro for now :-)