#Topaz simplify save settings skin
#Topaz simplify save settings trial

While the default setting looks good, I think with a little light masking, you could bring back some more natural texture in the chin and far cheek.

#Topaz simplify save settings skin

It also has some great encoding options built in (I think of Hybrid as Handbrake with a ton more features).Using the Skin Even preset in Topaz Clean 3

It includes everything I mentioned above except SpotLess. If you want to try playing around with AS/VS, there is an app called Hybrid that puts an interface around quite a few plugins to make things a bit easier (although still not easy). Either way, restoring and upscaling old film can be a really painful and time-consuming process. Massive pain, right? This is why some of the other folks suggested just trying to get a better transfer of the original films. Make sure that you either like your grain setting in the last VEAI pass, or go back and add some grain in through AS/VS afterwards Why not upscale again while we're at it? Because then you probably create some goofy looking faces and potentially other things (feeding a heavily processed video into VEAI is likely to give it too high a confidence when it goes to upscale again). If the resulting video is now too soft again, run the video back through VEAI but without any additional upscaling. Use AS/VS to despot (the relatively new filter 'SpotLess' is great but very slow, 'DeSpot' and 'RemoveDirt' also have their uses and are much faster), deflicker if you still have flicker or if the VEAI denoising introduced more flicker ('DeFlicker' should work for the film intensity flicker this video seems to have, or the nuclear option is something like the denoiser HQDN3D with a high value set for temporal luma smoothing) A straight 2x upscale generally works pretty well, anything higher is often just asking for it to look bad somewhere in the video (especially with faces that are not right up next to the camera, they can be nightmare fuel)

Use VEAI to upscale (either with tweaked Proteus V2 settings, or Artemis LQ if it's too noisy and you're having difficulty dialing in Proteus settings you like, although Artemis LQ will definitely increase the odds it looks a bit artificial).

If you know the content is just interlaced, you can try skipping this step and using one of the Dione options to upscale (I often like Dione Robust Dehalo, but YMMV).

#Topaz simplify save settings trial

Use AS/VS to get the content converted to a progressive source at whatever its original framerate was (this can be very annoying to figure out with old 16mm/8mm video that's gone through a conversion step or two, and probably will include some trial and error). You can use it to detect and remove duplicated or blended frames (which are very likely to be present, given conversion both to VHS and to DVD), denoise (although VEAI can do a good job at this), despot, deflicker, and more. Beware, everything I'm going to say below is a LOT of work.Īvisynth (AS) / Vapoursynth (VS) have a massive number of filters available to deal with old video. You're going to need more than just Video Enhance AI (VEAI) if you really want to clean this up.