Film restoration project, need filters
 

Does anybody have any recommendations for filter plug-ins for FCP for a film restoration project I'm doing? I had about 1600' of old family 8mm movies scanned to DV and I'm editing them together. As expected they are more than rough around the edges. They could stand some noise filtering and some heavy color correction (over exposed, under exposed, you name it) I've looked at a few of the plug in vendors (Joe's Filters, CHV Plugins, Boris) but I don't have any experience with any of them. I'd like to avoid buying the wrong product as much as possible.

Try importing a clip or two into Color and see how the outcome is. Color will offer a diverse range of color correcting capabilities as well as other methods of restoring the film.

hope that helped.

You might have a look at Film Fix.


http://www.redgiantsoftware.com/filmfix.html

Denoise and sharpen
 

I'm doing something related: I've transferred old analog video (PAL Betamax) to PAL DV, and I'm now trying to cut some of this together for a 90th birthday party this coming week-end. The stuff was shot in March 1987 with an old Sony Triniton camera that, if my memory serves me correctly, weighed what felt like several tons.
Given that the end product is for family distribution means, I suppose, that it doesn't need to be broadcast quality, but I'm still experimenting with cleaning the footage up as much as possible.
So far, I'm taking out a bit of noise (about 10%-15%) with the CHV Restoration package's noise reduction plug-in. That seems to take care of most of the noise, but what comes out is still watery around the edges and there is no detail whatsoever.
So for that I'm trying out various settings of the FCP unsharpen mask. My current settings are amount 55, radius 25 and threshold 0.
Note that this is a work in progress: I started this project a couple of hours ago, and I'm sure that as I keep fiddling, things may change.
For colour correction, I'm fortunate that there are not too many drastic problems, and the built in corrector can take care of most of it.
I had a look at the RedGiant FilmFix, but at more than US $700, it's beyond what I'm prepared to put into the project at this time.
All I basically need are images that show the people gathered with sufficient clarity for display on an ordinary SD TV. I'll be outputting to SD DVD.

Carl
Joburg

Thanks for the inputs. David, I downloaded redgiant's demo but for the moment, I can't seem to get it to install so I see it. I'm sure the problem is me but I open up After Effects after an install and their filters are no where to be seen.

After looking around a little, the CHV noise filters are actually not too bad nor too expensive. One thing I did not realize was how powerful Shake is. I guess from seeing a few of Apple's marketing shots I'd just assumed Shake was for 3D movie animation. In downloading and reviewing their demo version I see now I was quite wrong. Rather than spend $800 on a filter package I'd rather spend $99 on a small one and pick up Shake and use that in conjunction with Color and what is already in FCP.