I’m attempting to restore a rare Italian aviation film (Forza G, aka Winged Devils, 1972). The only copy I could get came from a PAL VHS recording of an OTA RAI broadcast, later transferred to DVD. Many years ago I received it from a kind persone from Italy, but couldn’t play it at the time due to the PAL/NTSC mismatch.
Motivated by the impressive online restorations I’ve seen of even worse-looking material, I recently extracted the DVD’s VOBs directly to MKV (no recompression) and ran it through HandBrake. As expected, quality was poor, even when using the best values for de-interlacing, analog noise and compression artifacts corrections.
I then decided to step up using more advanced tools and spent weeks building a VapourSynth pipeline—starting from AviSynth earlier—using QTGMC, vsTAAmbk, RGB conversion, Real-ESRGAN for upscaling, color adjustments, and debanding.
Despite all that, the result is only slightly better than the HandBrake encode. The improvement is so minimal it’s almost imperceptible. The footage still looks soft and degraded, even after all processing.
Here’s the core of what I’m doing:
- Source: PAL DVD → VOB → MKV (no recompression)
- Deinterlacing with QTGMC
- Antialiasing with vsTAAmbk
- RGB conversion and upscale with Real-ESRGAN
- Color tweaks + neo_f3kdb for debanding
My questions:
Is this kind of minimal improvement expected from such a degraded source (OTA > VHS SP > DVD)?
Am I missing a crucial step in the chain?
Can anything else be done to recover more visual quality, or is this the hard limit?
Any guidance or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
