restoring old family movies

SEW wrote on 6/11/2007, 4:22 PM

I recently received DVD copies of 8 mm home movies taken by my Grandfather from 1934-1951 and would like to cleanup the movies for the family . I would like to remove the scratches and boost the color (the movies taken after 1938 are in color). The movies were not stored for preservation and have a suprising amount of detail given the age of the movies. What techniques could I use to clean-up the movies? I have both VMS and Vegas v7 to use on the project.

Comments

rustier wrote on 6/11/2007, 6:33 PM

You cant remove the scratches with VMS or Vegas. You can improve the looks and diminish the flaws. Old washed out color film can be revived with HSL and color corrector. You can boost or ease the brightness and contrast which is good for some of those shots taken on a porch on a bright day. You can add a very very slight amount of blur to smooth over the rough edges - start out with a little gausian blur - there are horizontal and vertical blur, depends on the situation. You can nudge up the sharpness a little bit. There are a lot of tools to play with.

I had a great deal of fun with a project just like the one you are doing. Turned a rough video tape of the same stuff into something the family could appreciate for many years to come. And I put it to music of the period(s), which really helps one stroll down memory lane. Good luck and have fun with it.

You don't want to get rid of all the scratches and flicker do you? Thats half the charm and nestalgia.

You may want to render the dvd to an avi format format - less compressed, less headaches trying to catch the right frame. Do you modification there and then rerender into your format of choice.

The render post process will take a while depending on how heavy handed you are.