Cleaning Up Old Footage - Anyone?

Mr_Plant wrote on 5/30/2003, 1:37 PM
Hi there.

Anyone seen the new Led Zeppelin DVD??? A fantastic piece of editing indeed! Featuring an early Royal Albert Hall performance (which was silent) and a superb 5.1 remix from the multitrack tapes that existed! End result is breathtaking!!
What has this got to do with Vegas you ask??

Well.. this footage has been thouroughly cleaned up - through the Archangel Video Processor (a very expensive hardware solution that removes hairs, scatches, dirt, film defects etc. from archive footage). Some manual intervention was required as well of course...

Anyway... having seen this footage previously on bad quality bootleg, the final DVD quality is simply stunning and it got me thinking about Vegas and old footage...

I am presently working with some vintage silent 8mm film (from the seventies) and am wondering in anyone out there knows of affordable "video processing" software to help with the cleaning up task..

Anyone?

Comments

newbie123 wrote on 5/30/2003, 2:25 PM
bump.
i too would be curious to hear peoples input on this. i'm working with video from the fiftees right and boy could it use a heavy duty cleaning
BillyBoy wrote on 5/30/2003, 2:57 PM
Really depends are what EXACTLY you mean by cleaning up. Usually a "bad" video ie some old super eight or VHS or something gunky needs lots of work. I've been working on such a project for going on two years. LOL!

to break it down more...

VirtualDub (a must have application if you're serious about video editing and its free) is great at what most refer to as "pre-processing" things you do BEFORE you even think about editing. Its almost cult like, the following it has, much like TEMPGnc. Many have freely offered filters they've written to do all kinds of things. You could spend hours searching the web for special purpose VirtualDub filters. HEHE, I just did, and picked up a few new ones. That should 'clean up' old footage pretty good. Once you do, then the real fun begins... in Vegas.

Vegas has many FX filters, very powerful ones that work at a basic level (presets) and allow you to fiddle too...as much as you want. I'm a born again fiddler and prefer to do my own thing with color curves, color corrector, etc.. If you can't clean it up and restore it it with these two very powerful applications, chances are you can't. All it takes is a little effort and PRACTICE. Lots of that. The more you do it, the better you get at it. I wrote a few tutorials to get you started, they just scratch the surface.

http://www.wideopenwest.com/%7Ewvg/tutorial-menu.htm