I wanted to do an experiment.. With 6 copies of this film stacked together, I’m running into diminishing returns in terms of noise reduction. The only way I might get better results, is if the color and the luminance can be separated from one another entirely. That would be really easy if this were captured with my Domesday Duplicator, but for now I need to find an alternative approach. And I might just have one, but it’ll take a bit of effort…
If I force my VCR to play back the tape as PAL, I get just the luminance, which looks quite a bit cleaner than the full-color image.
Subtracting the luma version from the full-color version isolates the chroma, so I can get a clearer view of just how noisey each channel is –
Blurring the color and then adding it back on top of the luma kind of works. The colors are more muted than before, even without the blurring. Adjusting the levels of the color layer increases the saturation, but nothing gets it quite as rich as the original…
Another example, using the faeries from the other day. One trick I can do once the colors are separated, is shift the individual colors around to try to minimize some of the bleed –
One downside to this whole thing is that I’ll still need to capture the movie multiple times, because in PAL mode the luma goes from clear to useless and back again roughly every 3 seconds. When it’s clear or not doesn’t seem to be tied to specific times on the tape, so I may be able to get the whole thing by capturing it several more times.
