I had some Super 8 tapes transferred.

Super 8 is a film format, and not a tape format.

And unless your home movies from the 1970's were transferred using a 5-blade aerial shutter, there is very little you can do to improve them.

Could it be "Video 8" tapes?

I just did that the easy way with some old tapes:

1) improved the brightness of lows and/or highs with SONY Color Curves

2) processed the whole thing with Neat Video to my delivery format - which I then edited and smartrendered to the final result.

I hate to see someone get bad advice. While this was what turned me away from these forums, I just can't let this one go by. This is a one-time post for me.

It turns out that there is a HUGE amount you can do to improve Super8 film transfers. The results are beyond belief. I've spent countless hours perfecting tools and techniques and have joined forces with another person who worked on a completely different set of problems inherent in getting good results. My work was mostly oriented towards trying to rescue really awful 8mm film that had been badly damaged. So, my biggest problem was removing dirt (mostly mold) that was embedded in the emulsion and couldn't be removed with standard film cleaning techniques (although ultrasonic might have worked).

Here is the result of my work:



If you run it full screen, you will see a lot of detail on the side of the building and in the ground cover in front of the building that is completely obscured in the original.

However, if you start with Super8 instead of 8mm, and if it is well-exposed and in good shape, it is beyond belief what you can get. Here is a link to the results achieved by the gentleman from Belgium. Note the lack of shake; the excellent grain reduction, and most of all the amazing increase in detail. Absolute magic. Much of this is done by taking advantage of inter-frame tricks you can do with motion estimation.

Make sure you play it full screen. And yes, this is for real and it really does work.

Vimeo before/after side-by-side

Play this more than once, and you'll be more amazed each time. The image on the right really is Super8 film, not video.

If you are interested, here's the discussion in the doom9 forum:

The power of Avisynth: restoring old 8mm films

If you read all the way through that VERY long thread, you'll eventually see this image that I posted in the process of merging my work with Fred's work (he's the guy from Belgium):



This shows a single frame from an 8mm movie with the left being the original, and the right showing the improvement after doing all the tricks described in that long thread. Look at the railings on the porch. Amazing, eh?

Oh, and if the movies were transferred using a five-bladed shutter projector, much of what I describe above will not work. To get really good results, you have to do a "frame-accurate" transfer using a Rank Cintel, a Workprinter, Sniper, or similar unit. The old Elmo 5-bladed units or Goko transfer machines were a very crude attempt at eliminating flicker, but they really were only marginally better than just pointing the video camera at the screen and filming the result.

It's nice to hear from you again. Of course your response is a couple of levels up from mine, and I should have framed my comment in context to the way "most" of that stuff was transferred, using nonsynched home kits (or shooting the Da-Lite).

Actually, a camera chain I worked for in the 90's had aerial units that worked quite well when properly calibrated and synched, and I bet they would work even better with modern camcorders. Pretty sure they weren't Elmo, though.

My comment was also a bit brief because I assumed (and still do) that he is talking about Video8 or Hi8 analog, and not film at all.

But if it gets you coming back, I'll gladly continue offering bad advice!

;?)

I'll wager joejon meant film, not videotape.
Did you take a look at those videos John posted links to?
I saw them some time ago and they are truly jaw dropping.

Bob.

Wow impressive....

johnmeyer: What do you use for stablizing the video? Deshake?

Very well done!

Yes, it was Super 8 film that I had transferred. They said it was frame by frame. I had them save the files as .avi on a hard drive. I downloaded DeShaker and VirtualDub. I followed the instructions on the Sundance Media Group site. It didn't process or save any of the video, just a leader that said "Did not process pass 1".
In VirtualDub I brought in the video, then set the Pass1/2 as Standard NTSC, Interlaced-Lower Field First. I then clicked on Pass 1 and set the scale to full and All pixels. I left the rest. I then clicked Pass 2 and set it to Standard NTSC, 720x480, Bcubic(best), 1 for the edge and zoom, 3000 motion smoothness, and 99 for max correction. I then clicked Pass 1, ok, ok, rewind, then Play to Output. Then I opened the filter screen and double clicked the DeShake and clicked on Pass 2, ok, ok. I clicked rewind, then Play to Output. After I selected Save as AVI and gave it a new file name.
What am I doing wrong?

"What am I doing wrong?"

Asking in the wrong place.
John Meyer provided a number of links. Try those first. If that gets you nowhere send a private message to John Meyer.

Bob.

Hey joejon,
If you do take Bob's advice (a lot of forum members' guru in case you don't know) please email me at Randy @ CrystalClearNM.com and enlighten me.
I have a bunch of tapes of my family (from 1988 to 1989) that I'd like to finally do something with.
Thanks very much,
Randy

>>>did not process pass 1<<<<

I've had that message and it is the result of a simple driving mistake. I haven't run DeShaker for a while and have forgotten the cause. Haven't got time at the moment but will fire it up and this will help me see what you've (perhaps) missed. You shouldn't touch the play controls after the first pass and you have to make sure the log file is in the right place (i.e is actually where you've said it is).

I did get the DeShake program to work, however I don't think it's going to work out for me. I've tried various settings for the second pass but I get lines and artifact along the edges of the picture that I don't want. It may have to do with the source material. I did look at the samples that someone else did and was impressed but it doesn't seem to work as good for me. I may play with the settings more.
I did get good results correcting the white balance and correcting the color, contrast, etc.
One question I had was what is the difference between the Sony Sharpening and Unsharp Mask? I haven't used either much and was wondering if one worked better than the other to sharpen video.

When you mention problems with edges I presume you mean frame boundaries. Fundamentally it isn't possible to correct the whole frame. Only detail that is in all frames can be realigned (steadied) and detail outside those boundaries is hard to retain. So you get a steadied frame surrounded by filled in stuff (interpolated from previous and following frames). The filling works well when things are changing little ("stationary" camera) but can go awry when there are large changes in the image. Often it is better not to allow edge fill and zoom in on the timeline (don't let DeShaker do time-varying zoom to fill the frame).
Unsharp Masking is better than edge sharpening.