I set up VirtualDub using the settings guide on this site.
I've managed to capture my graduation tape, 1 hour 20 minutes long, with no frame drops or inserts
Now I need to crop the borders, resize to 4:3 aspect ratio (since it looks horizontally stretched capturing at 720x480), and deinterlace..and maybe anti-alias to get rid of jaggies?
What's the preferred way (and order) to go about these tasks?
Sample in reply below
Last edited by Major17Wood; 05-07-2022 at 09:09 PM.
Here is your sample de-interlaced, cropped and resized named GraduationDCR shortened to fit the 99MB file size limit followed by another file encoded to h.264 named GraduationE.
I used Avspmod for the first file using the following script sequence:
Holy crap dude, those look amazing! Nah that aint Cuomo...just some smart kid.
What's the difference between DCR and h.264? which one should I use?
DCR appears to be lossless still. H264 is compressed. (Notice the difference in filesizes). I'm assuming DCR is short for deinterlaced, cropped, resized.
H264 would be your final output - the compressed video after all filtering is done. H264/x264 is the most commonly used for video compression currently. MeGUI can be used to convert to x264 with an avisynth script performing all the filtering prior to compression, or you can produce a lossless avi first and then compress to x264 using your software of choice (megui, handbrake, vidcoder or ffmpeg as shown in the previous reply example)
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Major17Wood (05-07-2022)
Yes DCR is still in lossless state although de-interlacing is not a lossless process, From the DCR file you can either upload to youtube directly for sharing or encode for offline viewing/sharing. You would still have to keep the master files in case you want to go back and change something if storage space is not an object.
Here is how it looks like if you would upload it to youtube, Don't worry it's an unlisted video and will be deleted later. Uploading from lossless could take hours for a full tape, It is better scheduled overnight.
How did you dub the audio track to the tape? Is this a second gen dub?
Here is how it looks like if you would upload it to youtube, Don't worry it's an unlisted video and will be deleted later. Uploading from lossless could take hours for a full tape, It is better scheduled overnight.
How did you dub the audio track to the tape? Is this a second gen dub?
Audio was captured uncompressed, as indicated in the "virtualdub settings" post
Last edited by Major17Wood; 05-08-2022 at 12:59 AM.
That wasn't my question, How that song got into the tape, I don't hear the microphone's sound from the camcorder? Was it a second gen dub or the audio has been dubbed straight to tape, but from its quality this isn't a linear audio dub, it sounds HiFi, so it has to be a second gen dub, Consumer camcorders didn't have the option to feed the audio while shooting live.
Uploading from lossless could take hours for a full tape, It is better scheduled overnight.
I wouldn't be uploading that to YT. 93mb for 2.6 seconds is far too big and not realistic given the tape is 1hr 20min long. I'd be encoding it down to MP4 before sending it to YT.
It really depends on how much upload speed someone has, For me it would take the same amount of time the computer has to be on to encode at 5fps or just upload it to Youtube as is skipping an unnecessary encode. And if someone wants a copy he would just dump the encoded Youtube stream to his hard drive taking advantage of free iCloud, But I always keep the high quality lossless SD masters in case someone wants to do some editing later.
That wasn't my question, How that song got into the tape, I don't hear the microphone's sound from the camcorder? Was it a second gen dub or the audio has been dubbed straight to tape, but from its quality this isn't a linear audio dub, it sounds HiFi, so it has to be a second gen dub, Consumer camcorders didn't have the option to feed the audio while shooting live.
These tapes were created by a production company called American Multimedia Yearbooks and sold to kids who graduated.
Here is your sample de-interlaced, cropped and resized named GraduationDCR shortened to fit the 99MB file size limit followed by another file encoded to h.264 named GraduationE.
I used Avspmod for the first file using the following script sequence:
Could you explain how to run the scripts? I'm totally new at this. I like the quality of the mp4 and would like to store it this way to upload to youtube and to view on pc.
- the capture has crushed black, as reported by traal and msgohan: hist.jpg
- compared to (already excellent) latreche34 approach I added some denoise and light sharpening (and a different cropping approach to keep the same original proportions, but with a black border at the bottom):
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Edit: your original capture has halos, disable any sharpening in the player and in the capture card:
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Last edited by lollo2; 05-08-2022 at 04:34 PM.
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Major17Wood (05-08-2022)
"The ATI 600 USB clips blacks before the signal reaches VirtualDub. VDub's hook into the 600's proc amp won't fix it. You need an external proc amp to adjust black levels before they enter the 600. You can fix the highlights with the Levels() filter, much of the brights can be recovered. See the Levels() entries in the above scripts, which calm the highlights and contract output highs to y=235. It's too late for the blacks; they're crushed before the capture software sees them. It's a pain with the ATI 600 USB and the Hauppauge Live-2 USB."
Regarding the halos, ATI 600 defaults to 2 for sharpness. Dropping it to 0 I still see the halos. Must just be the tape.
These tapes were created by a production company called American Multimedia Yearbooks and sold to kids who graduated.
I would imagine the original tape would look much better than the second gen dub. Anyway, you cannot post that video publicly on youtube you would get a copyright flag for audio, You can only share it privately or unlisted.