Suggestions for fixing old video

Hi @FlyingFourFun 

Not had time to try the new Nyx model versus Neat V6 yet but will post after some tests.

Don't mess about for too long trying to clean this yourself.

Topaz Labs have been doing this now for a few years and as @FlyingFourFun says they have some good solid models for cleaning up SD footage and if quality of original footage is not too bad, make this scale into HD in some cases. 
Now the downside - you will need to invest in a higher end GPU to get the most out of this software so you have faster renders .

You will need to subscribe on yearly basis.

Quality software is not free !.

I've had some very good results from SD DV take interlaced footage then scaling up to progressive Full HD and adding second enhancement to clean video and sharpen things up. 

You can try out a demo version (with  watermark on www.topazlabs.com ) 

I would add that Neat Video plug in for Premiere is still the best tool for reducing basic video noise ( e.g. taken in low light on old video cameras).

I have personally had better results with that versus Topaz Video Ai . 

@spinachworld some unsolicted advice for you....  as someone who has done this a few times (during covid, I converted, and cleaned up about 200 hours of family videos to burn through the days).

I used Topaz,  and here are my biggest learnings.

1) DO NOT de-interlace until you find a spot in the process where it makes sense,  Handbrake did my deinterlace and I regretted it, as I found better ways in topaz to do it later in the process which much better results.

2) I always kept the original files,  as I was doing it for so long, I found Topaz was updating the tools, or I learned a new process that made it worth going to back to some videos to re-do them.

3) The files pulled off the DVD were of very poor quality compared to HI8, and other first source masters,  the DVD encoding process really did a number onlonger videos back in the day for compression.  Topaz does a really job job removing mpeg compression blocks btw.

4) I would try and do everything in Topaz for clean up, they have some amazing tools now (models)- the Noise removal tools were really good.  Also Starlight is AMAZING in many use cases (not all) - but its so slow if you process it locally, and expensive if you use their cloud service.  I would get myself a small sample clip, of each variant of video quality you have, and run them through a few models, and see what you like.

5) (ADDED LATE)  -  watch the faces!  these are the hardest thing to handle with any AI tools,  check them arefull because they can make the person look like someone else.  I found you had to carefully balance the process because oen AI model can do an amazing job with everything but peoples faces, and if you didnt check, end up with some scary results - so this is a place where you want to have test process fot the models, with faces (as an FYI, faces in the distance with low detail are effected different that faces closer to the camers BTW - this model selection with faces are involved are require the most supervision from you/humans).

Also;  go to the topaz forum,  there are a number of helpfull people on there with this sort of stuff for this software.  There are apperently other alternatives now to Topaz, but I have not needed to try them

As an aside, if you own BorisFX, they have a pretty good upscaler ML_UPRES that works realy good, but the source has to be decent to start with, Topaz is significantly better as the quality degrades.  I Use ML_UPRES when its 720p or 1080p to get to 4k or want to do a zoom.

The process of cleaning up the video will take LOTS of time - be prepared for that - the newest versions of Topaz now give you an estimated time thats pretty close.

Depending on your GPU, you need to decide if your system can handle 1 to 4 jobs at the same time.  I would recomend never goign to 4,  3 might even be too high (but I'm an idiot and I use 3) - I think 2 may be the best,  but test with one, and see how much CPU, System memory, GPU, and GPU memory is left before you increase the number of workloads in the que - if you get this wrong on a small batch, its not too much wasted time - but on a big batch you can add days to the process when it wasnt needed.

@spinachworld,

John's link is a good thread.

Topaz is amazing. They've just moved to a subscription model. I don't know the pricing.

Stan

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