Comment by alexpotato | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexpotato | Hacker News Reader

A side story on the techniques for restoration:

I'm guessing about 10-15 years ago I was watching a documentary on the re-release of Ken Burns Civil War.

They were highlighting the digital tools they were using to restore and enhance the original film capture for new streaming services etc.

They showed one of the restorers using a fascinating tool where one window was a video feed of the original film's "first pass" to digital. One of the landscape scenes had a small smudge in the upper right hand corner so the restorer pauses the feed, goes back frame by frame and then was able to drag and drop the frame into another window where he used Photoshop like tools to fix everything and then drag and drop it back into the "feed". Seemed VERY efficient and shows how good tools can really accelerate a workflow.

I'm not sure if the above scene is in the below quick documentary but there are a lot of other cool "behind the scenes of restoration" moments: https://www.pbs.org/video/civil-war-restoring-civil-war/

The documentary is no longer available (or, possibly, only available in the US), but the tool you're describing is pretty common in digital video editing. In DaVinci Resolve the dustbuster tool will look a few frames ahead and behind of the one where you want to paint out a mark, and make its best guess based on that.

I've used it to paint out tape dropouts on VHS transfers with remarkable success.

Do you do VHS transfers professionally or your own personal VhS? Stacks of VHS sittin in a corner that I need to decide what to do with

I got into it because my parents produced a video about the area I grew up in, back in the late 80s, and I only have VHS copies. The master tape is probably lost but the guy who shot it said there might be a copy made about 20 years ago on DVD that the editor made for archival purposes.

Since then it's turned out that people want their old tapes copied over quite a bit. I don't do it "professionally" simply because I cannot afford to dedicate that sort of time to it, because people actually expect it to be done more quickly than "okay today I have a full day of Teams calls where I don't need to say much so I'll get on with something fun" ;-)

My advice is to pay someone else to do the transfer, but get someone good. Most services online don't bother with a real TBC because a professional TBC is expensive, and not worth investing in for the average consumer. However, it is an absolute necessity if you want any kind of quality.

Failing that, you can get a retrotink 4k and any old HDMI capture card to do a "good enough" job for most folks. It has a sort of poor-mans TBC that will work as long as the tapes aren't too bad. You're still looking at a grand for the retrotink, but you can then use it for retro video games if you're into that.

I am fortunate that the Panasonic AG7650 I use for playback has a built-in TBC that emits stable enough video to go straight into my BMD Intensity Pro.

Disambiguation to save anyone looking it up: TBC == timebase correction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_base_correction

Here's that short documentary if you're interested: https://archive.org/details/restoring-the-civil-war

Restoration tools are very cool. One tool I liked allows you to draw a marquee around an area you'd like to fix. It then allows you to shift the frames forward/back in just the highlighted area to find a frame without the blemish. Obviously a more static shot gave better results, but it was fast and easy to use. Much easier than trying to use a blemish/clone tool. Doing the same fix with rotoscoping techniques would take much more time/effort.

I used to work at a film restoration studio about 10 years ago, and back then PF Clean from PixelFarm was more or less the industry standard. That might have been the software you saw.

I wonder if it was Cinepaint, one of the earlier Linux success stories

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