Quote Okay, so I have 25 individual video clips of grandchild, taken at various times by different people on different devices, between 2018 and 2022.............................


Suggestions? Ideas? Thanks!

Hi,

I don't think there's an issue with the 29.6-59.9 fps clips, other than PDR might have an issue with variable frame rate files typically from smartphones, but I'm not sure what can be done about the 10 and 15fps lo-res clips.

Any issues with VFR clips from smartphones can usually be solved by running them through handbrake or similar to convert to constant frame rate.

With the lo-res clips, perhaps the principle of "if you can't hide it, make a feature of it" comes into play? Play them in a small TV screen or looking through a window or on a car window or a head up display or whatever fits the visual themes??

Not sure even Topaz will be able to work with 175x144 but worth a try!

Others may have alternative thoughts.

Cheers
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Coincidentally, I downloaded the trial version of Topaz the other day just to see if it could do anything with those two worst clips. They are both in .3GP format, so I first ran them through VLC to convert them to .MOV (discovered that not all conversion options retained the audio, but .MOV did.)

For some reason, Handbrake refuses to launch for me (Windows 10). I can install it but when I try to launch it, it tells me that I am missing a driver that my computer DOES indeed have - but that Handbrake apparently can't "see". I've tried uninstalling and re-installing Handbrake but it gives me that error message every time. However, VLC does work.

So I brought the converted files (as MOV) into the Topaz trial version. Topaz doesn't even recognize a native frame rate of 10 or 15, but "thought" that the original frame rate was in the 20s. Also, some of the conversion models eliminated the audio (had to select Transcode in the audio option.) But as far as improving the footage, Topaz could do absolutely nothing. No real surprise, I guess.

As long as I had the trial version, I also tried it on a clip of an old garden video from 1988 which had been converted to .MP4 and has a resolution of 352 x 240 at 30 FPS. Clip is a bit less than 4 mins long, and I tried upscaling it to 1920 x 1080 at the same frame rate. Topaz took almost 2 hours to do that, and introduced so many artifacts that the result would be unwatchable on a tv-size screen. Was bad enough on a 17" desktop monitor, lol.

Topaz is probably awesome at upscaling SD or HD footage to either FHD or 4K, but it's clear that there's simply not enough data for it to work with if confronted with footage that is lower than 640 x 480. Which is understandable.

As for my compilation project, it looks like either 29.970 or 30 is probably the frame rate to aim for. One of those two clips that are just under 60 FPS is, as per Murphy's Law, by far the longest: almost 27 minutes (the other is only four minutes; different occasion.) Going to be a lot of dropped frames if it has to go from 59.940 to 29.970 and of course because it's a birthday event, the audio is important.

This is the first time I've had to deal with footage from multiple sources rather than footage that I've all shot myself on the same equipment (either a camcorder, a DSLR, or a GoPro) throughout each project and always in landscape orientation. This is because I've only recently (as in last month) acquired a phone that has a halfway decent camera (iPhone), lol. I still prefer a "real" camera though, to be honest. Guess I'm the outlier, lol