I just spent the past three days doing all the things Bob mentions on 56 reels of Super8 film. Most of the work was CC and also color curves. The film had been transferred by a commercial outfit using the Workprinter. Pulldown had already been applied, so that limited what I could do (MUCH better to work on the original and do all the corrections there, and do the pulldown at the final stage). They did a good job keeping the highlights (which is how you want to expose during transfer), but that makes the shadows pretty dense. Using the curves, I was able to create my own custom gamma curve and make the film look good on my monitor. I had to correct this on a scene by scene basis, so it took awhile. Same thing with CC.

Some of the film was shot on high-speed B&W stock, indoors, and the grain is overwhelming. Even the high speed Ektachrome Super8 stock pales by comparison. I loaded Mike Crash's filter, but I am not a big fan of this filter, or any simple temporal filter. This is no knock on Mike or his work, it simply reflects the fact that you can do a lot more harm than good if you don't also do motion compensation prior to applying the temporal filter. You can go to doom9.org and look at the AVISynth discussions to get a better idea of what can be done with far more exotic filters.

Back to your problem. Paradoxically, the bigger the physical size of the grain, the less likely you are going to be able to remove it without creating BIG problems.

Also, you should examine your original premise, namely that the MPEG encoder is going to have problems. I encoded my material at 5,700,000, burned a temporary DVD on a DVD+RW, and then viewed it on a "big-screen" SD monitor. I did not detect ANY encoding artifacts. I used to run a software company staffed with engineers we had brought over from Compression Labs, one of the pioneers in MPEG encoding. They taught me all the things to look for when it comes to artifacts, so I am more sensitive to this than most.

If someone told me I HAD to get rid of grain, I would:

1. Capture on the Workprinter.

2. I would color correct and apply gamma correction.

3. I would feed the resulting 18fps progressive images to AVISynth where I would use DePan or the newest version of MVTools to do global motion estimation to determine how much movement occurred from one frame to the next. I would then use a temporal noise cleaner (like the one Mike Crash adapted for Vegas) that can use the motion estimation vectors to adapt its cleaning to the amount of motion in the scene. During fast motion, the cleaner would reduce the amount of denoising so as not to introduce nasty motion artifacts. Conversely, when neither the camera nor the subject matter is moving much, the noise cleaner would crank up to the max and reduce the noise much more.

4. I would apply pulldown and then encode to MPEG-2.

I have been tempted to encode the 18fps material to DVD using the pulldown flag. Of course, this is the way 24 fps material is encoded, and the results are light-years ahead of what you get if you apply pulldown and then encode the 29.97 result. This happens not just because each frame can be encoded with more bits, but even more because you are encoding progressive frames. Of course, the resulting motion would be somewhat Chaplinesque, with things moving a little too fast, but it sure would look sharp and smooth.

BTW, we've had this discussion a few times before. Do a search on this board for "Grain Surgery" or search using my name and then search on the term "grain." Grain Surgery is a photoshop plugin, and one idea was to export, frame by frame, to Photoshop and do the cleaning there. Then, put the individual frames back into an AVI file using the import image sequence feature in Vegas. There were other ideas presented as well.

Also bear in mind that the appearance of many film defects depends to some extent on how the light is passed through the emulsion when it is scanned. High end scanners use several techniques to minimise them.
Bob.

Wow!! Thanks John and Bob, that's a seminar's worth of info in a single thread!!

With 8mm, I usually advise customers that after spending many hours correcting, the improvement will probably not be worth the extra $$ to achieve it. I've done quite a bit of CC on this particular batch using curves, etc., and it is more watchable, but this is some of the worst film I've encountered.

I usually encode on a set top burner (Pioneer Elite 7000) as the encode time using DVDA (or any software encoder) gets prohibitively long unless I can let it run over night. I'll try a comparison between the Pioneer and DVDA for quality.

Thanks for the input,

RalphM

>Do a search on this board for "Grain Surgery" or search using my name and then search on the term "grain." Grain Surgery is a photoshop plugin, and one idea was to export, frame by frame, to Photoshop and do the cleaning there. Then, put the individual frames back into an AVI file using the import image sequence feature in Vegas.

I've never tested this because all my work is interlaced, however, I can't think how this wouldn't work for your 8mm. Believe me, "Grain Surgery" is an absolutely incredible tool. Incredibly slow, but incredible results :-)