Old 8mm transferred to VHS, then to DVD?

[drzapp]

I have some VHS tapes that are captures of old 8mm, and I'm converting to DVD. I'm trying various virtualDub filters with limited success, mostly b/c I've never dealt with this particular scenario. Is AVIsynth the answer? I've attached a sample, hopefully someone can give me some tips on cleaning this up? Or maybe it's just garbage in, garbage out... Thanks

[sanlyn]

Quote:

Originally Posted by drzapp

Is AVIsynth the answer?

Yes, probably. But it's iffy to say for sure, judging from all the damage displayed by the sample. It's been sized incorrectly, and somehow the chroma channels are borked. It would have to be deinterlaced and resized again anyway because you can't make a DVD from a 472-pixel frame height. All dimensions for DVD and SD-BluRay frame sizes are mod-16.

Was the sample captured that way from tape? But I'm guessing: there's not much detail about how your sources were played, captured and processed.

As a point of readability for posting: the codec you used was deigned for HD digital sources, and unfortunately many PC media players don't recognize it.

[hodgey]

I've had a few of these, don't know what yours look like as I don't have the codec. I've seen both "home-taped" ones and ones made by a transfer company. I haven't managed to have much success with de-telecining these former as the frames are often uneven, noisy and blended so I tend to just run them through QTGMC instead (which can also help a bit to reduce flicker.) I've had some that were the latter, transfered from S8 to VHS by some company in a more professional manner, in those cases telecining may work better. Don't have the avisynth scripts on hand right now though.

[drzapp]

Quote:

Originally Posted by sanlyn

Yes, probably. But it's iffy to say for sure, judging from all the damage displayed by the sample. It's been sized incorrectly, and somehow the chroma channels are borked. It would have to be deinterlaced and resized again anyway because you can't make a DVD from a 472-pixel frame height. All dimensions for DVD and SD-BluRay frame sizes are mod-16.

Was the sample captured that way from tape? But I'm guessing: there's not much detail about how your sources were played, captured and processed.

As a point of readability for posting: the codec you used was deigned for HD digital sources, and unfortunately many PC media players don't recognize it.

Thanks for the reply. So the incorrect size was my mistake- I had been capturing some other stuff for Youtube with a bit of crop and forgot to reset it. Duh. And I use MagicYUV because it plays nice with Vegas and DVD architect. I don't have any info on how the 8 mm was transferred to VHS.

[drzapp]

Here's another sample from the same tape. I've tried different filters and settings, but not much improvement. The main thing is I don't know enough of the different AVIsynth scripts to know which ones to use, and trial and error is taking way too long. If anyone with more experience restoring old video like this could take a stab at it, I would be most grateful. The file below is an untouched capture with Lags.

[lordsmurf]

We all do trial and error. The only difference is we have more experience to know where to start trying. I also have a coding library to fall back on, places to start, past projects = experience.

Codec is MagicYUV.

For old 8mm film source, even those converted to VHS, I often find that TFM() can be helpful, sometimes even stacked TFM() 2-3 times in the script.

This is something I've run on damaged film before.

AVISource("e:\Old 8mm.avi")
AssumeTFF()
TFM(field = 1, mode = 5, PP = 1)
TFM(field = 0, mode = 5, PP = 1)
TFM(field = 1, mode = 5, PP = 1) 
yadifmod(order=1, mode=0, edeint=NNEDI2(field=1)) # faster yadif deinterlace

I'm not sure you need this exactly, so don't just monkey-see/monkey-do here. It kept as 29.97 (even though source for that script was 24fps or slower). I don't think you have 29.97 discreet frames here, but rather standard 8mm running rates.

Once some of the motion is fixed, you're left with chroma NR and color correction.

I don't have a lot of time to test, but that's where I'd start looking.