Best options to enhance poor-quality family videos

December 17, 2023 9:27 AM

I recently sent a couple of VHS tapes to a service that converted them to MP4 files. I now have over two hours of home videos that were originally shot on 8mm film. The quality ranges from poor to barely acceptable. What are my options to enhance the videos?

My late father shot a lot of film in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. He had it all converted to VHS about 30 years ago. The original films are gone, and all I have are the two VHS tapes. I sent the tapes to Scan Café to digitize them. I'm disappointed in the quality, though I'm sure it's not the vendor's fault.

Before I share the videos with my family, I'd like to improve them as much as possible with current technology.

I see that there are now a lot of options for AI-driven apps that promise to enhance videos. Some of them are fairly expensive, but I'm willing to pay if I can be reasonably certain that the videos will be substantially improved.

I would really prefer something that does an adequate job "out of the box" without a lot of manual tweaking of parameters. My time is fairly limited.

Does anyone have experience with this sort of thing and can make a recommendation?

posted by alex1965 to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

If the MP4s are of lower quality than the VHS, you should have the conversion redone by a better service bureau, or at a higher quality than the option you chose. Lossless conversion of VHS source is a solved problem, and there's nothing you can do accurately to recover the degradation of a lossy conversion. A lossless conversion would involve an intermediate stage of an uncompressed format, which the bureau can then convert into any variety of user-friendly compressed software or physical media formats (including Blu-Ray and DVD standard).
posted by MattD at 10:28 AM on December 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

Response by poster: I've worked with Scan Café in the past, and their work has always been great. I think the VHS tapes reflect the poor quality of the underlying 8mm films. I also suspect that there was some degradation of quality from the original process of converting the films to VHS, as well as some degradation caused by the slow aging of the VHS tapes themselves.

there's nothing you can do accurately to recover the degradation of a lossy conversion

Isn't AI image enhancement all about doing stuff like that? Certainly, that's my experience with using AI tools to fix-up still images.
posted by alex1965 at 10:38 AM on December 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

The key word there is "accurately." AI image enhancement isn't recovering lost information, it's looking at the information that's still there and trying to make educated guesses about what's been lost. The more degraded the original is, the more the AI needs to guess at what's been lost and the less accurate the result will be. So using AI-based tools is a bit of a deal with the devil. It'll fill in all sorts of details, but there's no guarantee or expectation that those details will actually reflect the physical reality of the scene that your late father recorded, rather than just being a guess based on whatever images were in the training set that was used to create the tool.
posted by firechicago at 10:58 AM on December 17, 2023 [10 favorites]

Maybe by putting a black frame around the image you can keep from scaling it up too much, which might help limit the amount of detail/resolution loss -- and also subtly remind the viewer that they are watching something Old.
posted by wenestvedt at 12:03 PM on December 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

While I agree with firechicago on the "deal with the devil", but in the category of free experimentation, you could use your HI (Human Intelligence) to play around with the video player VLC and your unsatisfactory MP4s, using the "Show Extended Settings" button which brings up the "Adjustments and Effects" dialog and then click the "Video Effects" tab.

You could click the "Image adjust" box which enables a variety of controls. I have found Gamma to be particularly helpful in some cases (it relates to the non-linear way that humans see video). If that helps you may want to adjust the Contrast or the Saturation (intensity of the colors).

Of course if you do find adjustment(s) that help, you are then back to having to re-encode from your 2nd generation video (VHS being 1st generation) which is a lossy process but would allow you to "bake in" the adjustments that helped. As for what software to use, I leave that to more expert members of AskMeFi.
posted by forthright at 12:05 PM on December 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I tried using Topaz Video AI to clean up old video and was disappointed with the results. I found that it either made very little difference or mangled people's faces.
posted by phil at 12:17 PM on December 17, 2023

(They did de-interlace the video, right?)
posted by wenestvedt at 4:36 PM on December 17, 2023

Response by poster: Not sure about de-interlacing. How do I check that?

I also wanted to make a couple of more points.

I'm fairly certain that much of the problem stems from the original 35mm films being some combination of too dark (or sometimes too light), out of focus, and shaky. And I think there was some degradation of the magnetic recording medium on the VHS tapes – which, as I said, are probably around 30 years old.

With regard to AI: I'm OK with it making educated guesses. In my (admittedly limited) experience with using AI tools to enhance crappy old photographs, those educated guesses are usually pretty good. Of course, it's totally possible that video enhancements are a lot more difficult than fixing snapshots. That's why I'm asking this question, to see if someone might have experience in this area.

The other thing I'm going to do is to download some trial versions of the AI tools and do some tests. I'm not encouraged by phil's report that Topaz doesn't work well, since that app was rated the highest in the article I referenced.
posted by alex1965 at 4:49 PM on December 17, 2023

Best answer: I think Topaz Labs or the paid version of Davinci resolve are going to have the best upscaling and denoising you can get at the moment. They might help a bit, but are not going to be able to do the same kind of restoration that you have seen AI models doing on still photos. You can clean up each frame individually, but it will basically be faking things in a way that you lose coherence between frames. Things are coming around really quickly though! I would just share the video you have now, and update everyone in a year or two when some decent tools start coming out.
posted by St. Sorryass at 1:14 AM on December 19, 2023 [1 favorite]