So the VCR I'm currently using (Panasonic PV-8661 from 1998) doesn't have a line time base corrector so I recently invested in a Panasonic DMR-ES10 to even things out. While the DMR unit greatly enhances the quality of the video, it also seems to add digital scanlines to the video capture (see attached image.)
Two things that I should mention:
1.) I'm not currently using a frame time base corrector yet although I'm going to meet up with a guy on Craigslist to buy an AVT-8710 unit (a green one) later this week
2.) I don't have a remote for the DMR-ES10 so I can't adjust the settings yet. It's possible that the noise reduction setting is on which I hear does more harm than good.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Also, should mention that these scan lines are much more pronounced when watching a video vs a still image.
How dos the video look without the ES10 and VLC player? VLC or VirtualDub (even better) can copy a frame directly from the video. not as a screen capture. We can't tell what's happening if your media player resizes the video, adds bars, or whatever it's doing. It also a good idea to avoid resizing or cropping frame captures if you want an exact image.
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demerit5 (09-21-2016)
sanlyn, thanks for helping me out with this. I really appreciate it. I've attached a better image using VirtualDub. The left side was captured without using the ES10 and the right side is using it.
Thanks again, but....well, I'm fairly certain you're not capturing at 438x294, so I'm guessing you have a PAL 4:3 video. I'm afraid guessing is the best one can do. Here's how direct frame copies are made, and I think you need only one image, from the ES10. But you can submit two images if you like.
Open the video in VirtualDub. Find a sample frame that you want. Click ""Video" -> "Copy source frame to clipboard", then use your image app to make an unaltered jpg or png image.
The ES10 portion of your sample doesn't appear to have any "scanlines" (we call them "borders", and in the case of your VLC player image they're of the letterbox variety). What frame size are you capturing? Are you capturing to lossless AVI, lossy DV, or some other lossy codec? What is the intended playback aspect ratio?
[ooops, lordsmurf beat me to it. Again. Caffeine deficiency at this end!]
I apologize. I'm very new to this and I'm especially new to VirtualDub. I've attached two more screenshots and will attach a 5 second video soon. Thank you again. You guys are awesome.
update:
Here is a snippet of the video. Overall I'm fairly happy with the quality but would love to get rid of the scanlines if possible.
So I think I got a bad ES10 honestly. I tried hooking it up to a heavy duty surge protector, tried different RCA cables, and even tried a different tape but I still end up getting the distortion. The input on the front doesn't even work for passthrough at all so I'm thinking the unit is no good.
That is possible. It may be a simple issue of a bad capacitor on the mainboard. If you know how to solder, and can check cap values, it's easy and cheap. (I'm not, and must pay others. My last ES10 repair was about $50.)
This is unfortunate really. I haven't been having a lot of luck getting this new hobby off the ground. First I got a bad TBC-1000 machine and now my DS10 is pretty suspect. I also have a Vidicraft proc amp and detailer on the way. It'll be a Christmas miracle if they actually work the way things are going.
Thanks for the sample and the pics (Yeah, I guessed incorrectly: it's NTSC, not PAL).
The pass-thru does work, but some say ES10 production runs differ so that the tbc works only on Line 1 in some models but on all inputs in other editions, and some people get really nasty if you say something like use Line 1 just to be sure. I use Line 1 on my ES10, ES15 and other pass-thru's.
I'll give the video a closer look later. But there's some obvious noise. I assume the horizontal "dark rain" and flickering hum bars don't exist on the non-ES10 captures, is that correct ???? There are also thin dark interference lines on varying frames. I still use a couple of 8661's myself, and an 8662 and 8664 among others, so the hot reds, neon brights and dot crawl are familiar to me. Panasonics for pass-thru have pretty good y/c comb filters to combat dot crawl, but you should be using Panny's s-video output for capture (it's composite to s-video inboard converter is clean, too). Luma Levels aren't out of control (they hit RGB 255 at times, but that can be rescued), and the capture card clips darks at y=16.
I had an old ES15 with subtley flickering darks. I would have had it checked but its power supply soon died, so I replaced it with a used ES10 at half the 15's auction price. Bought another ES10 for a spare, but it died after about 4 captures and, in a reverse of the earlier situation, got replaced by a decent used ES15 for a spare. Go figure. You do need their remote. Remotes get sold for $50 and up by ripoff artists, so don't fall for that.
The "good legacy stuff" has no new competition but they're getting old. I still recall my former $50 PV-8661 that arrived with missing takeup rollers! How about a SONY classic SLV-585HF with no capstan ??? Meanwhile the green AVT-8710 I bought in 2004 still rocks after 300-plus hours (knock wood).
The VLC player pics: This is 720x480 lossless AVI, which has no "display aspect ratio" flags, that is, it's DAR is the same as its physical aspect ratio, which here is 3:2. VLC Player and most media players can be adjusted for aspect ratio during playback, so if you told VLC player to play the AVI at something like a 2.4:1 aspect ratio you'll get weird borders. You can tell VLC to play this video at 4:3. You can also set either or both VirtualDub viewing panes to display at different aspect ratios (right-click on a VDub viewing pane to see sizing menus).
The extra 16 pixels along the right border is common for 4:3 VCR captures. Most standards use only 704 of 720 pixels, depending on source device and original mastering. Sometikes you get 8 pixels on each side. If you doubt this, take a look on your HDTV at a 4:3 movie broadcast from TCM or other old TV-show stations and you'll see extra black pixels on one or both image borders in addition to the side pillars that fill the screen. There are also 6 pixels of head switching noise and dot crawl at the bottom of your frames. At least you didn't get 12 pixels of noise along the bottom as I do with a few tapes.
This specific piece of video is telecined (3:2 pulldown). It's from filmed source, so it can't be deinterlaced. Use Inverse Telecine instead to get 23.976 fps original film speed. As an old 4:3 TV broadcast, likely the whole show is film source.
After inverse telecine you can center the image with AviSynth by removing unwanted border pixels and head noise and replacing them with new black pixels, without affecting the image or its original aspect ratio.
More on your sample later.
Quote:
Originally Posted by demerit5
This is unfortunate really. I haven't been having a lot of luck getting this new hobby off the ground. First I got a bad TBC-1000 machine and now my DS10 is pretty suspect. I also have a Vidicraft proc amp and detailer on the way. It'll be a Christmas miracle if they actually work the way things are going.
Yep, it's something of a lottery out there. I've had some bad buys myself. One question: what are you expecting from a detailer with old VHS tapes? Your 8661 already oversharpens somewhat as it is. And surely you don't want to sharpen dot crawl and VHS noise and defects during capture, do you?
So I definitely do have a blown out capacitor. I opened up the unit and there it was, plain as day. The seller let me keep the unit and refunded my money (minus $15 for shipping) so I think I am going to try and repair it. I'll either let some electronics repair shop do it if it's $50 or less or try my hand at soldering. I've actually wanted to try doing it for a long time.
Sanlyn, you really know your stuff. You've probably forgot more about this stuff than I know right now. I have played around with AviSynth a little bit. I'm really impressed with the QTGMC deinterlacer. That is an AMAZING plugin. Unfortunately it runs super slow on my Intel Core 2 Quad processor. I get 9.5 frames per second so it's tedious but I do get results with it.
As for the Panasonic PV-8661, I rolled the dice and got it for $10 at Savers and really lucked out. I opened it up to clean the heads and the thing was brand new inside. There wasn't a bit of dust in there. I also have a Panasonic PV-4060 machine from 1990 but the sound seems to be messed up on that one. It's very static sounding and I can't seem to fix it. I tried cleaning the audio heads inside but that didn't really do anything. What's cool about the PV-4060 is that it appears to be immune to Macrovision. It doesn't send the Macrovision signal during playback.
I'll probably follow your advice and not use the Vidicraft Detailer very often. I mostly wanted the proc amp but the Ebay auction was for both the detailer and proc amp for $60 (plus shipping.) I'm looking forward to playing with these after I straighten out my issue with the DMR-ES10.
Okay, long post over 2 morning coffees. But your plight was reminiscent of my own and kept me up late with a parade of memories. Maybe the following thoughts will help:
Quote:
Originally Posted by demerit5
So I definitely do have a blown out capacitor. I opened up the unit and there it was, plain as day.
Congrats on finding that part and thanks for the image. I could have spent 6 months with a Sherlock Holmes magnifier searching for it. Recently I had to learn to replace 2 small caps on my old 7500 All In Wonder AGP card, something new for me that brought me back to my ancient Heathkit and Dynakit days. Buying precision tools for fixup might prove more costly than paying a tech to do it; I had to borrow some pretty pricey hardware to fix my 7500 correctly.
Quote:
Originally Posted by demerit5
You've probably forgot more about this stuff than I know right now.
A lot of video voodoo looks like Merlin's work when you first encounter it, but no one knows everything about anything. I relate what I've learned from others or from (mostly) my own dumb mistakes. Few of us are guru enough to not learn new stuff. The biggest value of these forums is that there's always someone out there who knows more than you'd expect.
Yes, QTGMC is a slow worker but it does a lot of work. Good work takes time. But note that your video sample, like most old TV shows and movies, is film based and not interlaced. You might think that telecine is the same thing (2 frames in every 5 look interlaced, and many media apps report it as such), but it isn't. Technically the field phase relationship between telecine and true interlace differs. Most forms of pulldown will duplicate a field across two frames and when deinterlaced it looks weird on playback. There are other methods, like some British shows that use duped frames to make PAL play like NTSC.
With "regular" deinterlacers like QTGMC or yadif there's always a cost, and often you have to decide between which looks worse. Yadif makes few resizing interpolations (so it's fast and used by many media players), but QTGMC interpolates and re-translates like crazy. This can make stuff look cleaner, but it can also make stuff look over-filtered or plastic with some settings, and even QTGMC can create motion artifacts between moving objects in different frames. Deinterlacing requires that two half-sized fields be extracted and resized into full frames. This sounds simple until you try to figure how to turn a block of four pixels into a block of 6 or 8 or more without edge and color resampling problems and rounding errors. Deinterlacing telecined video means that the progressive frames and the telecined frames are treated identically, which shouldn't be necessary since 3/5 of the frames aren't interlaced anyway. Watch your sample in VirtualDub one frame at a time during motion and you'll see what I mean. Only 2 of every 5 frames appear interlaced.
The only people who really know the depth of Avisynth and its hundreds of plugins are Avisynth developers and programmers. Otherwise you learn from the way others use it. The same is true of VirtualDub, by the way -- many GUI apps fool you into thinking they're less complex and easier to learn than you'd think. For us mere mortals, there are things you can do with Avisynth that are impossible with VirtualDub, and vice versa. They go together for most projects. If I had to live without one or the other I guess I'd just lie down and throw a fit. There aren't high-priced apps that accomplish what either Avisynth or VDub can do in many respects for restoration work. With commercial software you have to pay what Disney and other big boys pay to do many things you do for free with Avisynth and VDub.
I've had bouts with many VCRs over time, starting with a cheapo late 1980's mono 2-head RCA and moving thru Panasonic, JVC, Hitachi, AIWA, Toshiba and Mitsubishi. Had so many breakdowns with pricey JVCs I finally gave up on them (not good for 6-hour tapes anyway). Historically, Panasonic VCRs and other brands started downhill in the late 1990's, so by 2000 no consumer VCR was worth using for digital work. The best vintage Pannies from 1995-96 hold up well. One of my best VCR's was a high-end 1991 JVC that I stupidly sold when I married and moved (My new bride balked at owning 6 VCR's, LOL!)
Starting with the 8600's Panny went for oversharpening, disregarded noise, pumped contrast and luma and chroma levels, and used more lightweight transports. Images made average users drop their jaws with the "sharpness" they saw on their CRTs, but it wasn't authentic -- and they'll get you acquainted really fast with sophisticated cleanup filters. Yet I'm still tied to my old 866x's for many reasons. Even with playback defects, they can sometimes restore life to dead old tapes.
I still use my 8661/8664's for some tapes but post-capture cleanup can drive you bananas. Most of my captures are with a 1996 Panasonic PV-4664, PV-S4670 non-TBC SVHS players, a 1995 PV-4562, and a rebuilt AG-1980, all with Dynamorphous metal heads, and all refurbed in some way. Not one of them tracks the same tape in the same way, so there are always test captures. Along the way I paid for some duds from eBay but got a few nice surprises, some cheap, most not so cheap. I seldom use a proc amp (mine is a Sign Video PA-100 bought new, successor to the Vidicrafts), mostly I use Virtualdub's hookup into my capture card's proc amp controls and VDub's capture-time histogram. You always have to tweak and clean up color later.
The more you learn the more picky you usually get, and the more you collect. I've used several capture cards, but mainstays are ATI 7500 and 9600XT AGP's bought brand new back then, in home-built XP PC's made from cannibalized parts or a rescued Dell Pentium-4 XP. A home built newer PC is for post processing and HD work. The software is Avisynth, VirtualDub, AfterEffects CS3 for an NLE with lossless media, lots of old and new TMPGenc software, and some freebie utilities and encoders. Many captures from some 400-odd hours of old tapes are archived on external USB drives, and I often use a.c. powered SATA hard drive fan-cooled enclosures for extra processing space. Monitors are ISP screens from LG and HP, calibrated with X-Rite calibration kits.
Among members here you'll find a whole world of parts and gear, of odd and sometimes exotic pedigree, with just as many tall but true tales that go with them.
Good luck. I've no doubt you'll have things going well.
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dknoll (03-08-2020)
As promised earlier, some notes on the sample capture:
Unfortunately we're stuck with the noisy capture, so ignore dot crawl and other glitches. Be careful with some players, as the 866x series did pump contrast and oversaturate colors, especially reds. This and the black levels in your sample result in colors that appear "coooked" as well as lost shadow detail. What capture card are you using? It clips blacks at Y=16. This can be shown in the images below.
The first image is frame 109 from your original, with the black borders and bottom head-switchng noise removed to avoid affecting the histogram. Bright levels aren't in really bad shape, but look carefully at the shadows in the dark uniformed figures at left, and in the girls' red hair. You can see dense black darks and an abrupt cutoff in dark detail. Midtones are suppressed at low black levels and make the image look relatively dim despite some hot brights.
The image below is a YUV histogram of the original frame in its captured colorspace. Note the luminance graph, which is the white bar on top. Each side of the histogram is shaded to indicate areas that lie outside the safe y=16 to 235 preferred range. The frame does show some overrun into brights greater than y=235, but those can be rescued later. At the left-hand "dark" side you see an abrupt cutoff and a high "spike", indicating clipping at y=16. Clipping means that all values below that point are converted to y=16, or effectively destroyed -- that's what clipping means.
Below, the same frame (borders removed) with a numeric readout of min and max luma and chroma values. You can see that the mininum low luminance values stop at 16. The high end peaks at 251.
Avisynth has an adjustable contrast mask filter that helps enhance dark areas and tame overly bright highlights. Below, you can see that the contrast mask helped retrieve a few shadow details but not much. It can't recreate dark detail, it can only expand what it finds at the dark end. Despite extra help from a filter called SmoothLevels that tried to expand the midtones and skin color range, color still looks overbaked, too yellow, and not quite real. There's only so much you can do once clipping occurs because clipping constricts the dynamic range of colors and levels. You can see that stretching too much distorts some areas and accentuates noise.
Below, a YUV histogram of the contrast mask image. At the left end you can see how the filter expanded a little of the dark area to reveal a bit more detail. But only so much is possible.
The fix for this is to use the VDub proc amp controls or a proc amp to brighten the image ("Brightness" affects black levels, contrary to what you'd think, while "Contrast" controls highlights). You still need a histogram to judge details. Disable VDub's capture histogram before you start capture, and temporarily crop off black borders to avoid false readings (black borders always peak at the left side of a histogram). Raise the black levels slightly, which means you'll also have to tame contrast a bit.
Here's how you can work with black borders and border noise in Avisynth. You can sue other methods, but I like it that you can do it in Avisytnh fairly simply without affecting the core image or its aspect ratio. BTW, not all videos have these glitches, which vary widely.
First, please note that all of the images below are resized with Spline36Resisize in Avisynth to show how they display at 4:3 (640x480).
The image below is frame 109 original at 4:3. You have a black border at one side and head-switching noise along the bottom.
Below, the same frame is cropped at the left and bottom, then new black pixels are added to center the image. I cropped 8 pixels from the bottom. There are actually 6 border noise pixels and another band of dot crawl, or 7 pixels total. You can't crop uneven numbers in YUV, so I cropped off 8 bottom pixels. The finished product still has the original image proportions, minus 1 bottom pixel. The Avisynth code is:
Code:
Crop(0,0,-16,-8).AddBorders(8,4,8,4)
The frame as displayed at 4:3 during play:
One more exercise. You can crop the frame from 720x480 to a final 704x480, which is legal for 4:3 video in DVD or BluRay (you'll have to stay at 720x480 for 16:9). In this case I did the same as before, but left 8 pixels off each side border. The code is:
Code:
Crop(0,0,-16,-8).AddBorders(0,4,0,4)
. The same 704x480 image displayed as 4:3:
Does the core image in the bottom image look "wider" to you? It should, because it is. It's 640 pixels wide, but the the other two core images aren't. Recall that SMPTE standard 4:3 playback and capture covers 704 of 720 pixels, more or less depending on the gear. Not all devices observe that standard (often DV sources are different), so don't always expect this result. For 16:9 anamorphic video, you still need 720x480.
So, why not capture to 704x480 or 640x480? Well, first, 720x480 offers more horizontal resolution to work with. Second, most devices at more narrow frame sizes will still have side borders, in which case you'd have to do some unwanted resizing to get 704x480, 720x480, or even borderless 640x480. Sometimes you just can't win.
Which image is real 4:3 or 1.3333:1? The answer is that none are exactly 1:3333:1. The core images in the top and middle frames are 626x472, or 1.3263:1. The core image in the bottom picture is 640x472, or 1.3356:1, which is wider than 1.3263:1 but a few decimals closer to 4:3. Having standard formats based on multiples of 16 pixels won't always deliver exactly as expected.
A lot of debate on these issues, but I usually stick with 720x480. This is complicated by what Hollywood does and what video labs do. Hollywood 4:3 movies are 4:3 for TV shows and occasionaly for movies but Holleywood made most 4:3 movies at "Academy ratio", or 1:37.1, which is wider than 4:3. Example: "Shane" was shot on 35mm at 1:37:1. I see a lot of Shane broadcasts at 1:3333:1, either cropped at one side or looking kinda squished. I've also seen them stretched or zoomed to 16:9, which is criminal.
Video sources and playback/capture differ. Stick with 720x480 for VHS capture, then process as needed. Be very careful with cropping, even with VirtualDub and NLE's. There are strict rules based on frame structure and colorspace. Scroll to the chart in the middle of this page: http://avisynth.nl/index.php/Crop.
Sorry for the delay. I had to go down to Charlotte, NC for a job interview. Sanlyn, thank you so much for helping me out with this. I learned more talking to you than I did reading random message boards for six months. You are definitely a genius at this sort of thing. I have a much better setup now then I did when I posted the sample pics and video. I now have a avt-8710 TBC (green version) and a working DMR-ES10 unit that doesn't add weirdo scanlines to everything I capture. It looks like I have a one year IT contract position lined up. Once I start, I will definitely become a premium member of this site.
Again..Sanlyn, you are a gentleman and a scholar and I wouldn't be opposed to you dating my sister.
