Digital cleanup of old VHS-C footage (maybe AI can help?)

pugleon

Hi All

I have an old VHS-C tape of a friend who passed many years ago. It was found in an attic and in really terrible condition. It was shot in black and white (no idea why its from the late 90s) and there's tones of artifacts and at many times in the footage theres nothing but static. It was also shot by someone who has no idea how to work a camcorder. But there are a couple (4/5 short sections) with 10-20 seconds of footage that you can see this person out of the 30 minutes of recording. I'd like to try clean that up somehow. Methods of capture wise I've used:

A very high end sony VHS player with a VHS-C to VHS converter cassette (also tried the outputs of the camcorder but it was worse playback)

A reliable ezcap av to usb capture device. And finally settled on a really nice cheap solution of a AV to HDMI converter and a separate HDMI capture dongle and OBS freeware. Works great managed to record (and upscale) a part of an old VHS movie and the quality is great.

Sadly the VHS-C tape is in bad shape so only able to capture what is, a bad source to begin with...

My question is this: Is there any cheap or low cost ways to use AI to clean up the footage? I tried AVClabs but I dont have a decent enough PC/GPU to run it it takes several minutes or more per frame. Also not convinced it would remove major artifacts seems more aimed at upscaling?

Is there anything out there thats more fit for purpose, cleaning up bad footage? Better yet is there any services online you can upload footage to and its done for you?

pugleon

Or second question is there a lab in Ireland or nearby that specialize in restoring old VHS/C tapes in bad condition. When I say bad condition the tape itself defects on it/warps in places. And at one point sellotape was definitely used to repair a section of it (so any company I've approached so far wont touch it)