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+--- Thread: Advice on free local B&W film colorization — DDColor + exemplar propagation vs altern (/thread-4515.html)
Advice on free local B&W film colorization — DDColor + exemplar propagation vs altern - KAKA_colorize - 18.10.2026
Hi everyone, I'm working on colorizing old black-and-white films (Iranian cinema) on a modest PC — GTX 1650 with 4GB VRAM, so the DiT/HAVC route (8GB+ VRAM) is out of reach for me.
My current pipeline:
1. Split into scenes
2. Colorize one keyframe per scene with DDColor-large (CPU)
3. Propagate colors with an exemplar-based model (zhangmozhe Deep-Exemplar-based-Video-Colorization, CPU)
4. Reassemble with original luminance + audio
It works, but I'm hitting quality limits — DDColor sometimes paints foliage red/orange instead of green, and the 2019-era propagator can smear colors. I've tried SD 1.5 img2img as an alternative keyframe colorizer and it was worse.
Here are two clips of the same footage for comparison:
- My pipeline (DDColor-large + exemplar propagation): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zabMn4zj5HN2chivLLXT2iGpvHU0F4Vk/view?usp=drivesdk
- MagicHour's colorizer on the same footage: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Tc6TrzRO3YRbJAt7VjvqTe2q1F1dx0UX/view?usp=drivesdk
Questions:
1. Is there any newer free colorization model that runs on 4GB VRAM or CPU and beats DDColor-large for natural colors (green foliage, natural skin)?
2. Has anyone tried denser keyframes (e.g. 1 per ~30 frames instead of 1 per scene) with exemplar propagation — does it help temporal consistency enough to justify the extra compute?
3. Out of curiosity — does anyone know what approach MagicHour's video colorizer uses? Their results on the same footage are clearly better (semantic understanding of objects), and I'd love to know if there's a public model in that direction.
Thanks for any pointers!
RE: Advice on free local B&W film colorization — DDColor + exemplar propagation vs altern - Dan64 - 18.10.2026
Hello,
try vs-havc deployed with Hybrid.
For the settings to use, read the chapter 4.0.1 at page 42 of HAVC user guide
Dan