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06-10-2018, 10:14 PM
ehbowen ehbowen is offline
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Last night I was capturing an old VHS tape our family hadn't looked at in 30 years. It turned out to have this rare footage: A steaming engineroom on a WWII battleship underway.

Background: When a Navy ship is returning from a long deployment, sometimes the Navy will organize "Tiger Cruises". In this case, on our way back from the Persian Gulf and Australia in January 1988 we pulled into Pearl Harbor. All crewmen who could be spared were given leave to fly home to the States, and those of us who remained aboard were allowed to invite [male!] friends and relatives to join us for what should have been an uneventful cruise back from Hawaii to Long Beach. Of course, we happened to run into the middle of the worst storm in that portion of the Pacific in recent history, but that's another story....

My father flew out to join us, and he was allowed to bring his video camera on board. He came with me down into the engineroom and filmed. Now, as you can plainly see from the full clip (rendered to MP4 to save space; sorry, Sanlyn!), he has no aspirations as a videographer. Still, what I'd like to do is take this footage (which may never be replicated again) and clean it up as best as possible to make a "guided tour" of the engineroom. Since it's so hectic and choppy, I'd like to use a lot of "freeze frames" where I use a title overlay to explain what the viewer is looking at. This video will NOT be burned to disc; I plan on digital distribution only.

So it appears that the first step is to deinterlace to try to smooth out the images for what could potentially be dozens of freeze frames. The video was captured lossless; workflow was Mitsu HS-HD2000U>>TBC-1000>>ATI AIW 8500DV on an XP3-32 bit Dell running VDub 1.9. I'm also attaching a short AVI clip which should give a better idea of what the original looks like. Note: The AVI clip, as well as the MP4 render, were generated from the captured AVI original by VideoStudio. It's possible it was munged up; if so I can use VDub to generate a clip straight from the original. **WAIT** Might as well just do that; used 7-Zip to get it below the 99MB limit. Interested in expert opinions as to how bad or good a job VideoStudio did.

Since I'm still in learner mode and since this is a personal project, I'd appreciate suggestions as to how to proceed. Thanks!


Attached Files
File Type: mp4 EngineroomTour.mp4 (62.49 MB, 37 downloads)
File Type: avi EngineroomTour_01.avi (81.45 MB, 6 downloads)
File Type: 7z TigerCruise1.20180609.Engineroom.clip.avi.7z (69.37 MB, 2 downloads)
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  #2  
06-10-2018, 10:42 PM
sanlyn sanlyn is offline
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Thanks for the samples. I really don't see the point in advising on how to clean up VisualStudio's mp4 encoding. Besides, the stingy bitrate is totally inadequate for fast motion video.

The 7Zip sample is not an unaltered segment of the original. VisualStudio has altered it and converted it to uncompressed RGB. That's two reasons why your 7Zip sample is 6 times the size of a typical YUY2 losslessly compressed capture. Hopefully you are not capturing in RGB, which would be disastrous. As lossless Lagarith YUY2, your 7Zip sample is only 33MB.

I have to apologize, as I gave up long ago trying to clean up analog source that has been converted to lossy DV. There are bound to be plenty of members around who'll tackle this one. Avisynth has a Loop() function and other features that would be useful in achieving what you describe. I wouldn't use VisualStudio to do it.

Last edited by sanlyn; 06-10-2018 at 10:57 PM.
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  #3  
06-10-2018, 10:59 PM
ehbowen ehbowen is offline
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Ah. My bad; the original capture was YUY2 but when I edited the 7zip clip (in VirtualDub, not VideoStudio) I unknowingly had it set to save as RGB. Let's try that again: Engineroom Clip 2.

And again: I didn't have compression turned on. (Lots of little gems to find here and there!) Here it is using HuffyUV.


Attached Files
File Type: 7z TigerCruise1.20180609.Engineroom.clip2.avi.7z (72.83 MB, 6 downloads)
File Type: avi TigerCruise1.20180609.Engineroom.clip3.avi (92.89 MB, 11 downloads)

Last edited by ehbowen; 06-10-2018 at 11:08 PM. Reason: Add Another Clip
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  #4  
06-11-2018, 12:28 AM
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lordsmurf lordsmurf is online now
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First do a careful (probably not default) QTGMC.
Then desired frame as bitmap (BMP), then process it.
First in Avisynth, then OnOne Resize (fractal), and finally Photoshop.
I've done this quite a bit in the past year, now that the family videos are finally all captured.

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  #5  
06-12-2018, 04:50 AM
sanlyn sanlyn is offline
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Thanks for the samples of the original. What a nightmare.

The script below first repairs color and levels, then deinterlaces and denoises, then tweaks darks that are still slightly obscured due to the camera's reaction to strong overhead lighting. The first lines set up a tricky masking operation I'm borrowing from a member at videohelp -- "brights" contains overly blue image components, "mids" contains the overly yellow components, "y_Mask" is a grayscale selective luma mask that tries to strike a balance between brights and mids. Dark portions of y_mask block brighter (yellow-green) image elements, light parts of the mask allow darker (blue) image elements to pass. Adjusting brightness and contrast in the mask adjusts the same thing in the output and adjusts color balance in brights and midtones (which will be tricky because the auto "features' of the camera keep changing the picture).

Code:
Avisource("drive:\path\to\TigerCruise1.20180609.Engineroom.clip3.avi")
ConvertToYV24(interlaced=true)
brights = ColorYUV(off_u=60, off_v=-20)
mids = ColorYUV(off_v=-5,off_u=-10,off_y=20)
y_mask = ColorYUV(gain_y=100, off_y=-50).GreyScale()
Overlay(mids, brights, mask=y_mask)
AutoAdjust(high_quality=true,auto_gain=true,gain_mode=0,bright_limit=1.0,\
  dark_limit=5.0,auto_balance=true) 
Levels(14,0.95,255,16,250,dither=true,coring=false)

convertToYV12(interlaced=true)
AssumeTFF()
### --- deinterlace and mild denoise ---
QTGMC(preset="very fast",EZDenoise=4,denoiser="dfttest",ChromaNoise=true)
ContrastMask(enhance=3.0)
Crop(0,0,0,-8).AddBorders(0,4,0,4)

### --- RGB for VirtualDuib filters ---
ConvertToRGB32(interlaced=false,matrix="Rec601")
return last
Two VirtualDub filters were applied to tweak the script's output (Color Camcorder Denoise and ColorMill). The filters and their settings can be loaded by clicking "File..." -> "Load processing settings...", locate the saved .vcf file, and click "Open" or "OK". The two filters must be in your VirtualDub plugins folder.

ContrastMask is an .avs plugin previously posted here as ContrastMask.avs: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...ontrastmaskavs. The VirtualDub filters were previously posted as a .zip package of 4 plugins: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...dub_filterszip.
Version 2.6 of AutoAdjust is here: http://latoninf.free.fr/d9/AA/AutoAdjust-v2.60.7z. The filter is discussed here: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=167573. It comes with a long .txt file for documentation. If you need the 7Zip decompressor and software, it hs excellent and free and can be downloaded here: https://www.7-zip.org/.

Nothing can be done about the ghost trails generated by the under powered camera. Hectic and careless camera handling is annoying to watch, but I realize the video's value as a recording. High bitrates are required for that kind of motion, or you may as well not waste your time encoding.


Attached Files
File Type: mp4 Clip3.mp4 (9.76 MB, 11 downloads)
File Type: vcf Clip3_VDub_Settings.vcf (986 Bytes, 2 downloads)
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The following users thank sanlyn for this useful post: ehbowen (06-12-2018)
  #6  
06-12-2018, 06:14 AM
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lordsmurf lordsmurf is online now
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I think you can get a nice 5x7 print from this, maybe 8x10 at best. I've recovered better from worse.

But without an exact frame to consider, I won't even touch this. Just general advice.

What I can say for sure is that Avisynth alone won't cut it. Again, you'll use it, but you must also use On1 fractal resizing with some Photoshop editing. Maybe Gimp editing, if you want to cut cost corners. And On1 has a trial for 30 days. But honestly, both are worth it. On1 has a lower price, if you look/search around for it. And then Adobe CC has trials as well.

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