Appears to be the same price as the ebay one, but thanks for the tip.
What do you think of the videos I posted? Or does that not matter anymore.

No. The 9600XT came with two ferrite filters in 2004. The filters are still in the little cardboard box inside the original ATI shipping container.

Yeah, I scrolled down the eBay page and saw there are 5 to a set.

Will answer that one tomorrow. You might find it interesting, but I have to prepare some graphics first.

Just checking :wink2:

After a couple of hours of playing with test_b I don't envy the task. Test_a, meanwhile, is unuseable. Looks like the video itself has been around the block a few times. It started as film 23.976, then the BBC inserted some pulldown and/or blended frames for the BBC's 25fps. Then it went through some really bad digital encoding at ridiculously low bitrates that smeared and distorted fast motion, then it was resized for NTSC with telecine and blends intact, and more dupes were added for NTSC.

Deniterlacing gives lots of leftover blends, and inverse telecine skipped just as many of them. The cleanest 23.976 restoral I got on my end was QTGMC to deinterlace, then sRestore to eliminate as many dupes as it could find.

Another problem is the horrible color washout and bad levels: darks were crushed and buried a long time ago, and highlights were blown to smithereens. Add RF noise in the darks and lower midtones, then add aggressive temporal filtering and ghost trails along the way when making the original tape, and you have a total mess. Coutn the usual VHS levels variations from shot to shot, and the damage is complete.

Below is unprocessed, blended frame 108 from the original avi. You can deinterlace or inverse telecine if you want, but it looks pretty sloppy. srestore considered this a blend with a dupe of the previous frame.
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...1&d=1443457279

Below, the original frame 108 becomes progressive frame 86, with some lightening to try to make things look less grim. You won't get rid of the chroma ghosting. It was there when this blended frame was resized by the dudes who made this tape.
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...1&d=1443457414

Below is the original frame 1597 with dark objects obscured into a mushy blur. You can use contrast masking to try to retrieve some of it, but it's still a blur (see new progressive frame 1278 at the bottom) and is mostly noise that required some Avisynth filtering.
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...1&d=1443457498
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...1&d=1443457764

In the attached mpg I cleared most of the RF noise, though it still affects rough edges on camera pans. Frankly, this video was borked in production. I don't think you can do very much with it, and the work certainly won't make beef out of the soft mush the makers made of this video. You can play with levels and color, but the original data was mostly destroyed way back there.

The attached mpg is 704x480 4:3 NTSC with soft-coded 3:2 pulldown applied during encode for standard DVD. h264 won't be any better (I already tried). Anyone who'd like to tackle this one is welcome -- but I suggest that rather than kill yourself or live with a lot of disappointment, just go to Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Les-Miserables.../dp/B004I2K4DY.

Thanks very much for this insanely detailed report, sanlyn. Part of me wishes I had saved you the trouble though: my initial interest was only insofar as this told us much about the artifacts we were discussing in the thread, and I already knew that there are several DVD releases of this exact performance. I'm not even particularly attached to it, as I'd found it the week before at my girlfriend's work's take-a-book/leave-a-book shelf. I'd only attempted a capture with it since I figured, it being a retail tape that was unopened when I found it, it would provide a good barometer of how the capture setup was working without having to worry too much about flaws in the tape itself.

Boy was I wrong!

How in the hell does something like that happen? Do they destroy the original master when undergoing the PAL conversion? Or were they just too lazy to hand off the original to be properly telecined for NTSC?

Yup - in other tests I had actually run it through a BVP4+ with knobs in their default positions. This led to severe loss of black detail but at least got rid of the 'haze'.

Thanks again for explaining how borked this was and explaining how to best to make something of it. It's been educational :salute:

For the record, the first real conversion I'd like to do, once I get rid of the diagonal line noise, is of another retail tape, "The Brave Little Toaster". This has been released on DVD but with severe flaws, with several reports at Amazon of the original VHS being a better treatment. Looking forward to your advice on that one!

It happens often, especially with VHS. Usually the master is retained, but this oddity appears to have been made from another tape. I've struggled with several of those myself.

The haze didn't go anywhere. Crushing the blacks made it worse and clipped other dark colors along with it, pretty much "soldering" all of it together. I could have drawn up a little more dark detail but it was all noise, including the RF junk.

1. A good backup battery will usually help clean up AC power line noise, give you time to save a project on your PC, and may save a repair bill your HDTV in case of a low-power/brown out event! (I had such an event, w/o battery backup, and it blew out my tv's power supply!). I have a 600 watt, is enough to power 2 tower PC's, plus HDTV, 2 Monitors, and a few ext. drives, plus the 600 watt has a nice little LCD display. Mine has lasted about 5 years, but you eventually have to replace the battery. Here is the newer similar version from APC: http://www.amazon.com/APC-BR1000G-Ba...ywords=apc+ups

1. You should be able to find Snap-on Ferrite cores pretty cheap like here:http://www.allelectronics.com/make-a...-7mm-id/1.html This size/shaped ones fit snug over S-Video cables, and power cords, however I got several sizes for ANY and ALL wires going to my Cap PC/VCR and AvToolbox just to be sure (Anything related to Cap PC),because that's what it took to reduce EMI in my particular situation. I got lucky a few years ago and found a bunch at my local Electronics supply store

1. I found this ATI 4 headed adapter to reduce the length of the original Purple breakout cable, but is cheap, and there might be an issue with one of the audio pins:( http://www.svideo.com/4head.html Again the shorter the better in my case..

edit:

Lost my Internet connection for a while, there should be a few more sentences to my last reply, but got timed out. hope admin can fix?... ALSO..That link in my first paragraph to Walmart APC BR700G is a mistake!,here is the correct link:http://www.amazon.com/APC-BR1000G-Ba...ywords=apc+ups Please note that APC model numbers like 1000 is not 1000 watts, but 600 watt capacity.

Sorry... I find these Scene not in "Les misérables 25th annyversary"

Can I have the about time?

The tape could be the same as this older DVD edition: http://www.amazon.com/Les-Miserables...0_SR115%2C160_. The words "In Concert" don't appear in that title, however, but it is a bbc broadcast. From user reviews, it appears that the old VHS issue is a disaster. I'd rather have the better audio and video on the 25th anniversary DVD or BluRay. The specific scene shown in this thread isn't really necessary: performances of the play use the same music.

For my own taste, I prefer listening to the older CD-only thru my $7500 stereo. You don't need a light show to enjoy the music.

I just wanted to make a comparison to my source [Vimeo]
From the same cutting.
On Blu-ray would already be the best.

Whatever was typed was never submitted to the site. There's nothing to fix.

When I type long replies, I quickly copy it (ctrl+C) in case it needs to be pasted in Notepad (save for later) or to try again in a browser. That may be something to consider in the future.

Just type it again. I've had to do that before on other sites.

A few ferrite cores and the UPS w/AVR arrived today. So far, they don't seem to be having an effect. I guess I'll be ordering those Blue Jeans now...

If all those fixes had no effect at all, the BJC cables might have some effect (mainly cleaner color and less wire transmission noise, whose effects are subtle). But that alone might not completely solve the problem because one big test hasn't been made -- at least, it wasn't mentioned. How do these tapes look on a different VCR, even a cheapie? Your earlier and unworkable "pre-repair" video sample with the horrible noise involves a logic error. The story behind these videos was that the results are better because two elements were changed: the VCR was serviced, and the card's fan was replaced. Which of those two elements were responsible for the improvement? What was your constant control factor, other than the tape itself? If both changes made a difference, which of the changes cured the color noise and which of the changes cured the RF noise? (Actually, the RF noise was only partially fixed. The chroma blasts were likely a repair of the y/c and color cards in the VCR).

You would need the UPS unit anyway, unless you want your motherboard wiped out by the kind of power surge that renders cheap or overpriced MonsterCable surge protectors totally useless.

I don't think there's reason to believe that replacing the fan on the card changed anything though. I was under the impression that the various symptoms on the pre-repair recording described are typical of AG-1980s with bad caps, no? And doesn't the fact that I've seen the exact same form of interference on multiple tapes and a different VCR count for something? (I realize that I only provided one, but can put up a few more.) It doesn't strike me as likely that they all suffered from the same weird interference-looking problem when being mastered. Or did I misunderstand what you're trying to confirm here...?
Just looked around the house and found one very old VCR (doesn't even have stereo sound output). Tried to play a tape on it but instead it stopped and spit the tape back out. Did this a few more times, same result. So that's busted. Do you think it's worth buying another VCR (even a cheapie) to see how the tapes do with it?
The only constant here, if you don't count the card, is the capture PC itself, and the cables.

Guys, I think I figured it out. It's the stupidest thing. Hold on while I confirm.
ED: Nope. False alarm. Drat!

After doing some searching, it seems like this is a known issue with the AIW 9800 because of poorly designed board layout. First link in particular has a pic of diagonal noise that looks exactly like mine except with a positive slope instead of a negative one.

http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/3...ture-card-ever
http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/1...iw-radeon-9800

Some of those 9700 and 9800 cards had the problem, some didn't. I use 7500 and 9600XT AIWs, never had that problem. Where the RF comes from is anyone's guess. You can try the revised input dongle mentioned by Rockovids, although i don't know if it fits the 9800. An alternative would be the ATI 600 USB or the Diamond version of a similar USB device. Have seen a lot of VHS captures with the 600 and they look pretty good.

I looked and it seems like my board has the same configuration as the ones that suffer from this issue. I haven't gotten around to learning soldering just yet, so my solution is to keep the card on the side until I'm competent enough to fix it, and in the meantime just scored an AIW 9000 on eBay for $15.
I also bought the dongle rockovids pointed out, and will report back about whether it makes a difference at all.

Just realized that one of the links above is incorrect so you guys may not be following what I'm saying. Here's the link to the thread where the guy figured out it was the two little cores on the card, which are very close to the Theater 200, that are the source of the interference, and shows what he did to fix it.

Totally cool. If you don't feel up to doing it yourself, maybe you can find a techy who will.