I would put this in a youtube tutorial if i would be a good english talker
But since i’m dutch my english is not that ok, but i like share my story here.
(left Blender filtered, right halfway end product of virtual dub, orginal was mostly all bleu, nearly no green at all.).
Background, on a family visit an uncle showed me a movie from when i had the age of 3.
I had never seen the movie i didnt knew it existed, its just a few minutes of me, and family, and mostly his family.
But well my attention was triggered, the video was quit old well… ahum i’m 46
So it was made ‘just’ 43 years ago, thats a short time ;).
It was in age that people made movies on 8mm film roll. (analog movies without sound!)
Of-course colors degrade over time, so he had let it put on VHS then, once the miracle of TV recording
As we all know those tape recordings didn’t live for ever too.
So (sadly) about 10 years ago, when the digital wonder of DVD came, he had let it put from VHS to DVD.
And i said ‘(sadly)’ since the video codecs and computers of that age where, well lets say not top quality.
Poor video codecs broke a lot of what was still left.
But i started, i used Prism software to get the DVD format to Avi (as the DVD video headers where not OK).
Next i used virtual dub to do most of the improvements in regards to noise, sharpenging and film dirt removal.
Yes film dirt (the dust dirts from the original super 8mm movie, had survived all video translations over the years).
Most of the video filtering i did with virtual dub, here a list of the used filters
At a staggering speed of 3.5 frames a sec and 14 hours later the movie had a passed a noise and color correction
I got back green grass from a movie that was mostly blue
(old VHS aging had distorted colors).The final result a 13 Gig file ! (I started with 400MB), but 13 gig since i try to reduce signal loss at this point.
Still it left me with one problem while the colors where now mostly better, on the very very bright parts
i had now a yellow tint, (was required for green grass); i needed to get these bright yellow parts more close to white.
With some control, as well you know, i think in blender terms, and i had no software that would allow me to play in the direction i had in mind.
At first i tought this couldnt be done in Blender, but then i found Blender’s compositor does have a video IN !!
So with that available i only had to let my mind speak out and put the nodes on the screen as i had imagined.
Its the picture you see on top of this small article from me.
A final pass in virtualdub to add some random music track under movie and it will be ready
Hm apparently that’s still missing in the compositor movie node (audio out), but then again there is no audio in for the end as well but that’s easy to solve in virtual dub. (well i could drop an mp3 in the video editor too ofcourse )…
BIG THANKS to all Blender developers, making me able to recover some childhood memories !!!
