Clip: Attempted video cleanup - 1956 talk show on homosexuality

This fairly homophobic broadcast (however well meaning it might have been) was one of the first TV talk show segments to deal with any kind of gay issues, even negatively, and so it was a kind of progress. And at the time, "It should be seen as a disease, not a crime" was a passably progressive attitude, even, surprisingly, in the view of certain gay activists of that era.

A globby, highly compressed video of this episode of THE OPEN MIND has circulated for years. It was sourced from a kinescope recording with a noisy optical soundtrack and was digitized at 1/4 the resolution of standard definition.

I decided to see how good I could get it to look and sound using Topaz Video AI (the new Iris model, with the settings adjusted manually) to upscale and denoise the image and interpolate frames, then Neat Video (for deflickering and more denoising), and running the audio through Izotope software and separately through Adobe Podcast's voice enhancer, and then mixing the two restored audio tracks, and finally further tweaking the picture and sound in Premiere.

The result looks a bit overprocessed (especially the eyes), but it's better than the tech was even a month ago.