Trying to save botched footage

[adaml]

I have some botched footage from an old shoot that I'm trying to salvage. It's from the beginning of a drawing - red colored pencil on warm-colored paper. The lines are very faint but I need to make them legible or the footage is useless. The camera angle that was supposed to be used was framed too tightly and missed all the action. This angle is ugly and way too wide but it's all I have to work with. Shot on a one-chip hdv camera - the hv20 I think. Below is a frame-grab. Is there any economical way to save this footage? There's about 20 minutes of it.
Thanks,
Adam

 

[kevinottawa]

To put it blunt, I think you are screwed.
On that image I can't do anything to it where I see a picture of something.
I only spent a minute, but the usual sharpen and emboss tools arnt working.
Do you have a high rez frame for us? Maybe the shotty jpeg just didnt get the detail of the frame.

 

[clang]

Have a fiddle with colour correction, brightness and contrast etc (worrying only about the drawing paper, not the rest of the frame) and see if you can make the drawing visible. If so, you should then be able to duplicate the video in your NLE, put a paper-shaped mask on one with the colour correction etc, leaving the other video track showing underneath with normal video. Unfortunately, the artist's hand is presumably moving, therefore your mask will have to do the same, which could be a whole lot of work