Tips for restoring old guncam footage
 

Hey folks,
I have some old World War II color guncam footage that was transfered directly from 16mm film to dvcam. I brought the footage into Premiere and I am trying to restore the film as much as possible. I'm trying to work with levels and remove the haze or washed out look. See attachment for what it looks like straight from the tape.

Does anyone have any tips on the best filters or plugins to use for Premiere 1.5 and how I can restore some of this stuff? I know how I would do it in Photoshop, but I'm not sure if it's pretty much the same thing with the levels tool in Premiere? I tried it and it's not the same.

Nick
I'm working with a lot of downloaded black and white footage, dating from 1903-1968. The fact that its B & W means that I don't really have the colour issues you have, but when things get too rough on the noise front, I drop in one of the filters from Boris Continuum Complete Version 4 (BCC4). The DeNoise filter is a dream, even though you lose some sharpness. It then becomes a choice as to whether you want the noise or the sharpness and then to tweak to where you want to get it.
BCC4 also has numerous colour filters that may come in handy. And a nice "optical stabiliser" when things get too rocky.
Adjusting levels in Premiere Pro (I'm using PP 2) can be tricky --- much trial and error here, and I've spent many hours adjusting levels only to find that the end product (seen a day or two later) looks like it was shot on very inky 16mm.
My approach now is to leave things alone as much as I can: old footage is old footage and as tempting as it is to fiddle around and clean it up as much as possible, it loses something. I dunno what.
Hope this goes some way...

You can run the DV files through our Enosoft DV Processor and apply color correction.

With a boost in contrast and a reduction in brightness, you can improve the appearance quite markedly.

Attached is an example along with the Proc Amp settings.

I converted the original sample jpeg to a 30-second DV AVI file. Color correction took 25 seconds on a 1.5GHz Pentium M (a single core processor) laptop.

You can also perform the correction during the capture process.