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  #41  
10-03-2015, 12:12 AM
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  1. Isolate Your Cap PC/VCR/Processing units with cokes on all Power/Audio/Video/Cables..also any power cords from transformers...I Had to put 4 chokes per cable on my Bluejeans IN/Out S-Video Cables!.. Chokes come in 3 to 4 different diameters,depending on cable diameter. Get small/Medium/Large. Note: all my RFI problems came from Cap PC. Don't worry about Cap Card! Connected Input Cables only amplify any Card problems!..Don't try to solder or fix cards! Stay with your original set-up! These Exellent ATI/AIW Cap Cards were made b-4 we had to deal with all this modern wifi and broadband stuff flying around the place!..If you notice, most modern manufactured Monitor cables come with little "barrels" on each end, these are built in RFI chokes, but in the S-VHS days,they were not included. But you need to choke them nowdays! Every wire coming to, or from your Cap PC, can be considered as a receiving antennae for modern RFI/EMI. BTW, A Choke is only successful if it is placed as close as possible to the terminating end of the wire on both ends.
The more cable cokes, the better (IN MY SITUATION) but if you don't get any better results with creative choking,then the problem may be internal (hardware/changes!)

Last edited by rocko; 10-03-2015 at 12:52 AM. Reason: add
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  #42  
10-03-2015, 02:28 PM
bilditup1 bilditup1 is offline
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Originally Posted by rockovids View Post
  1. Isolate Your Cap PC/VCR/Processing units with cokes on all Power/Audio/Video/Cables..also any power cords from transformers...I Had to put 4 chokes per cable on my Bluejeans IN/Out S-Video Cables!.. Chokes come in 3 to 4 different diameters,depending on cable diameter. Get small/Medium/Large. Note: all my RFI problems came from Cap PC. Don't worry about Cap Card! Connected Input Cables only amplify any Card problems!..Don't try to solder or fix cards! Stay with your original set-up! These Exellent ATI/AIW Cap Cards were made b-4 we had to deal with all this modern wifi and broadband stuff flying around the place!..If you notice, most modern manufactured Monitor cables come with little "barrels" on each end, these are built in RFI chokes, but in the S-VHS days,they were not included. But you need to choke them nowdays! Every wire coming to, or from your Cap PC, can be considered as a receiving antennae for modern RFI/EMI. BTW, A Choke is only successful if it is placed as close as possible to the terminating end of the wire on both ends.
The more cable cokes, the better (IN MY SITUATION) but if you don't get any better results with creative choking,then the problem may be internal (hardware/changes!)
That thread I linked to is from 2004, so I think it's clear that these cards were simply not designed properly even for that era. I don't want to go on a wild goose chase buying more and more chokes, or a different power supply or fan etc, if the problem can be avoided by a simple fix like orienting the card's on-board chokes perpendicular to the board on top of a couple of heatsinks (as pictured). In the meantime, using a card with the same Theater 200 chipset which is less sensitive to RFI is a good stopgap. (Heck, I could just stop there...)
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  #43  
10-04-2015, 01:00 PM
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Originally Posted by bilditup1 View Post
That thread I linked to is from 2004, so I think it's clear that these cards were simply not designed properly even for that era. I don't want to go on a wild goose chase buying more and more chokes, or a different power supply or fan etc, if the problem can be avoided by a simple fix like orienting the card's on-board chokes perpendicular to the board on top of a couple of heatsinks (as pictured). In the meantime, using a card with the same Theater 200 chipset which is less sensitive to RFI is a good stopgap. (Heck, I could just stop there...)
Yes, hope that works for you, and any others with the same card/problem...I did submit a thread a few years ago, wondering if my 9600xt was one of those with defective shielding, and possibly a (list?) of any other ATI/AIW card model #'s with this problem. Sounds like the problem was hit and miss with some of them. Sounds like you know what you are doing, hope any suggestions help
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  #44  
10-07-2015, 08:29 PM
bilditup1 bilditup1 is offline
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Hey all,

The AIW 9000 came in on Monday. I popped that in and didn't change anything else about the set up, and it appears that the herringbone noise is gone, though I'm not 100% sure. Here is an excerpt of the beginning of Les Miz again(*). What say you?

Separately - I'm having a bit of an issue with compression that I can't figure out. Not really related to this thread so I made a new thread for it here.

(*) I put this tape in one of my old VCRs to see if it still worked, and it promptly got mangled and spit out. That's why you have the prominent white ziggies at some point. I won't be using this tape anymore for testing, I'm afraid...


Attached Files
File Type: avi lm3_excerpt.avi (98.33 MB, 7 downloads)
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  #45  
10-07-2015, 08:34 PM
bilditup1 bilditup1 is offline
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And rockovids - I definitely appreciate your advice here. I may still try with the chokes because I hate the sound of this AIW 9000 fan...
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  #46  
10-08-2015, 03:40 PM
bilditup1 bilditup1 is offline
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Bonus time!

I received my BJC-2 S-Video cables earlier this week. So how's this for a bonus - a comparison of an original 9800 cap (which I haven't posted here before), one with the 9000 using my original cables with ferrite cores on them, and one with the 9000 using a couple of YC-2s. Note that I think I touched the levels on the original 9800 cap when making it, so unfortunately the comparison may not be exact, but you could clearly see the difference between the two in terms of interference - which I don't think is completely eradicated with the 9000 but if there's a regular pattern, it's very difficult to discern.

Thing is...I think these new caps with the 9000 are softer, for some reason...?

Anyway, they're all attached. Compressed using x264 at crf-13, which hopefully should be enough. Looking fwd to your replies!


Attached Files
File Type: mp4 empire1_9800_cap.mp4 (45.13 MB, 5 downloads)
File Type: mp4 empire2_9000_cap1.mp4 (61.00 MB, 4 downloads)
File Type: mp4 empire3_9000_cap2_bjc-yc2.mp4 (62.15 MB, 5 downloads)
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  #47  
10-08-2015, 10:29 PM
sanlyn sanlyn is offline
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The 9800 caps might look sharp, mainly because the contrast range is beyond legal limits for digital video. Makes for a snappy photo with blown out brights and grimy darks, but it's unpleasant viewing. The opening 20thFox logo has ugly line twitter, bad aliasing and shimmer on motion, and stutters badly during the zoom. In most other scenes motion is on the edge of choppy. 2pass VBR encoding will give better detail and motion control than low CRF. Long GOPs like those you have with 250-plus frames will lose detail, will upscale poorly on big displays, smears motion, are not allowed for many playback formats, and not handled well by some playback systems. The encoded bitrates are too low for clean rendering of fast motion video.

There are serious image flaws whose cause and fix can't be determined because no one knows what your original captures look like. All three "progressive" samples look to be processed incorrectly, with serious problems that are kinda obvious and which should have been spotted before encoding.






Attached Images
File Type: jpg f596.jpg (50.4 KB, 96 downloads)
File Type: jpg f765.jpg (41.2 KB, 96 downloads)
File Type: jpg f832.jpg (69.7 KB, 96 downloads)
File Type: jpg f1051.jpg (51.1 KB, 97 downloads)

Last edited by sanlyn; 10-08-2015 at 10:43 PM.
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  #48  
10-09-2015, 12:34 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by sanlyn View Post
The 9800 caps might look sharp, mainly because the contrast range is beyond legal limits for digital video. Makes for a snappy photo with blown out brights and grimy darks, but it's unpleasant viewing.
Must have been that I played around with the levels a bit too much and didn't reset them before the actual capture :/

Quote:
The opening 20thFox logo has ugly line twitter, bad aliasing and shimmer on motion, and stutters badly during the zoom. In most other scenes motion is on the edge of choppy.
Yeah, I noticed this. I don't think it looked great in the source but the encode made it worse.

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2pass VBR encoding will give better detail and motion control than low CRF. Long GOPs like those you have with 250-plus frames will lose detail, will upscale poorly on big displays, smears motion, are not allowed for many playback formats, and not handled well by some playback systems. The encoded bitrates are too low for clean rendering of fast motion video.
I'll keep all that in mind, though I'll note that compatibility doesn't bother me too much. There should not have been GOPs longer than 10x the fps, but, how long would you suggest? And what bitrate?

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There are serious image flaws whose cause and fix can't be determined because no one knows what your original captures look like.
Unfortunately they'd be too big to put anywhere, unless you're comfortable downloading from my personal ftp (not on this site) or mega.nz.

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All three "progressive" samples look to be processed incorrectly, with serious problems that are kinda obvious and which should have been spotted before encoding.
I assumed since this was a movie trailer that I could just do a simple tfm(order=1).tdecimate() and send it on its way. Clearly that wasn't sufficient. But I'm really not sure what to look for. I guess the sort of blurry motion on display in these pics?
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  #49  
10-09-2015, 12:42 AM
bilditup1 bilditup1 is offline
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I don't suppose these encodes are good enough to pick out the minute differences between them. So I'll either redo them properly or organize a way for you to get the originals, once you chime in.
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  #50  
10-09-2015, 01:04 AM
bilditup1 bilditup1 is offline
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I assumed since this was a movie trailer that I could just do a simple tfm(order=1).tdecimate() and send it on its way.
Am realizing now that there is nothing simple about any of this...
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  #51  
10-09-2015, 09:35 PM
sanlyn sanlyn is offline
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Originally Posted by bilditup1 View Post
Am realizing now that there is nothing simple about any of this...
Not exactly "simple", but far from rocket science. There's more than one sloppy way to get 23.973 to 25fps or 29.97fps, but usually only one or two ways to reverse the process and rework it correctly.

Likely that opening Fox logo has a different structure than the rest of the movie. It looks like one of the stock logos for film and TV that somebody screwed up. But it might be possible to smooth things out. The rest of the sample is indeed a trailer from movie source.

Appears to be another bad film->PAL->NTSC conversion. There must be a dozen variations in the way those things are processed. I record some HD BBC shows that use plain 3:2 or 2:2:3 pulldown that's easier to break down, but I still run into plenty of oddball structures with PAL->NTSC (HD broadcasting ain't always what it's supposed to be). You'd need only a few seconds of YUY2 unprocessed AVI for analysis, so you could make one sample with that stupid logo to see what it looks like, then a separate short sample with "regular" video movement. Either of those would fit the 99MB upload limit and give us better info to work with.

As for long GOP's: these are normally employed for very small file sizes for internet streaming. The priority is file size, not quality. One GOP in your samples was encoded at 277 frames. For comparison, remember that DVD and BluRay spec were designed for assured playback and good motion rendering on both the best and worst playback systems. The accepted maximum GOP for DVD is 18 frames. For BluRay, the spec requires either 1-second or 2-second GOP's (that's 30 or 60 frames NTSC, 25 or 50 frames PAL, or 24 or 48 frames for film speed).

Color looks cleaner and smoother in the BJC cap and it looks like either less edge noise or less phoney sharpening. These are subtle differences, but color in the other two caps looks a bit more muddy (it's starting to look grungy in empire_1_9800). If you have your AG-1980 sharpness turned all the way down I'd say it's not necessary to turn it all the way off. Otherwise there are better sharpeners in Avisynth and VDub.

I've been working on a cap from a 1980's VHS of Fantasia. Yeah, it's out on newer DVD/BluRay issues but they're out of print and selling at robber baron prices or screwed up pirate issues and, frankly, having seen one I noticed digital problems of their own. You'd think a VHS of a 1940 movie would be simple enough to remove telecine and fix up the noise and bad color. Telecine was no problem, but in several scenes the borders change size (???) and in some shots the animated critters do some odd stuff like one frame is 2 frames ahead of the others, in another spot a frame is repeated later. This happens on all three of my VCRs and on TV play, so it's definitely in the tape and not a problem during capture. It's just a sloppy film transfer, period. I could live with the digital version, but frankly this is a self-learning exercise with Avisynth.

This stuff doesn't happen just on tapes. I have a DVD recording of a Vitaphone 1928 short from TCM with frozen and missing frames (I saw it happen during the broadcast. What a mess! And telecined, too). If you think you have some frame structure problems, yours are rather common. Try working with this unprocessed s-video capture off SD cable: BlossomSeeley_and_BennieFields_1928.mpg (14 secs).

Apart from the logo in your sample, the movie parts likely have consistent processing. But it's hard to say without a chunk or two of the original cap.


Attached Files
File Type: mpg BlossomSeeley_and_BennieFields_1928.mpg (9.90 MB, 4 downloads)
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  #52  
10-09-2015, 11:23 PM
bilditup1 bilditup1 is offline
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Originally Posted by sanlyn View Post
Not exactly "simple", but far from rocket science. There's more than one sloppy way to get 23.973 to 25fps or 29.97fps, but usually only one or two ways to reverse the process and rework it correctly.
That's what I thought, too... :/
Quote:
Likely that opening Fox logo has a different structure than the rest of the movie. It looks like one of the stock logos for film and TV that somebody screwed up. But it might be possible to smooth things out. The rest of the sample is indeed a trailer from movie source.
OK great! But then I'm not sure what you meant when you said that "All three "progressive" samples look to be processed incorrectly, with serious problems that are kinda obvious and which should have been spotted before encoding."

Quote:
Appears to be another bad film->PAL->NTSC conversion. There must be a dozen variations in the way those things are processed. I record some HD BBC shows that use plain 3:2 or 2:2:3 pulldown that's easier to break down, but I still run into plenty of oddball structures with PAL->NTSC (HD broadcasting ain't always what it's supposed to be). You'd need only a few seconds of YUY2 unprocessed AVI for analysis, so you could make one sample with that stupid logo to see what it looks like, then a separate short sample with "regular" video movement. Either of those would fit the 99MB upload limit and give us better info to work with.
Cool beans - they're all attached

Quote:
As for long GOP's: these are normally employed for very small file sizes for internet streaming. The priority is file size, not quality. One GOP in your samples was encoded at 277 frames. For comparison, remember that DVD and BluRay spec were designed for assured playback and good motion rendering on both the best and worst playback systems. The accepted maximum GOP for DVD is 18 frames. For BluRay, the spec requires either 1-second or 2-second GOP's (that's 30 or 60 frames NTSC, 25 or 50 frames PAL, or 24 or 48 frames for film speed).
OK - my final destination most likely won't be BD, but it seems like a good common-sensical number to start with. Thanks.

Quote:
Color looks cleaner and smoother in the BJC cap and it looks like either less edge noise or less phoney sharpening. These are subtle differences, but color in the other two caps looks a bit more muddy (it's starting to look grungy in empire_1_9800). If you have your AG-1980 sharpness turned all the way down I'd say it's not necessary to turn it all the way off. Otherwise there are better sharpeners in Avisynth and VDub.
Interesting. I do in fact have sharpness on the AG1980 all the way down, after seeing the damage it was doing. I guess I'll nudge it a bit. Otherwise I did no filtering at all - still a ways from doing that kind of thing yet, I think? - so it's interesting that it seems like has less phony sharpening.

Quote:
I've been working on a cap from a 1980's VHS of Fantasia. Yeah, it's out on newer DVD/BluRay issues but they're out of print and selling at robber baron prices or screwed up pirate issues and, frankly, having seen one I noticed digital problems of their own. You'd think a VHS of a 1940 movie would be simple enough to remove telecine and fix up the noise and bad color. Telecine was no problem, but in several scenes the borders change size (???) and in some shots the animated critters do some odd stuff like one frame is 2 frames ahead of the others, in another spot a frame is repeated later. This happens on all three of my VCRs and on TV play, so it's definitely in the tape and not a problem during capture. It's just a sloppy film transfer, period. I could live with the digital version, but frankly this is a self-learning exercise with Avisynth.
Sounds like an interesting thing to work on, if frustrating, heh.

Quote:
This stuff doesn't happen just on tapes.
Yes, one of my somewhat dormant projects, where I got a lot of practice using Avisynth, is trying to fix the Avatar: The Last Airbender DVDs, which Nickelodeon completely butchered. And they did this to the master, too, as per the guy who prepares these for streaming on Amazon Instant Video, and uses it as a torture test. Eventually I realized it would have to be an episode by episode effort, even if some parts, like the credits being text at 30 over a 24 background, are consistent. I'll eventually crack this nut though! There will be justice!

Quote:
I have a DVD recording of a Vitaphone 1928 short from TCM with frozen and missing frames (I saw it happen during the broadcast. What a mess! And telecined, too). If you think you have some frame structure problems, yours are rather common. Try working with this unprocessed s-video capture off SD cable: BlossomSeeley_and_BennieFields_1928.mpg (14 secs).
Wow. That's a real accomplishment guys. What a mess indeed.

Quote:
Apart from the logo in your sample, the movie parts likely have consistent processing. But it's hard to say without a chunk or two of the original cap.
Let's find out, eh?


Attached Files
File Type: avi empire1_fox.avi (39.76 MB, 3 downloads)
File Type: avi empire2_fox.avi (41.08 MB, 2 downloads)
File Type: avi empire3_fox.avi (41.11 MB, 2 downloads)
File Type: avi empire1_clip.avi (96.89 MB, 3 downloads)
File Type: avi empire2_clip.avi (98.43 MB, 1 downloads)
File Type: avi empire3_clip.avi (98.74 MB, 1 downloads)

Last edited by bilditup1; 10-09-2015 at 11:24 PM. Reason: grammar
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  #53  
10-10-2015, 07:54 PM
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Originally Posted by bilditup1 View Post
Am realizing now that there is nothing simple about any of this...
Well Said! Very hard for this 50+ year old! Just got into computers about 6 years ago, let alone this VHS to Digital thing. Have had to re-read the guides and posts over and over again. Even walked away from it all for a while! But after getting into it again, it's all slowly sinking in. Most of my stumbling blocks have been been odd/bad luck problems with hardware,(and RFI), forgetting what I have learned here, and mostly trying self-appointed and cheap shortcuts, trying to quickly skim over all the good info, hoping for a quick miracle. But I'm a perfectionist, and keep trying,eventually the challenge will pay off.
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  #54  
10-11-2015, 08:37 AM
sanlyn sanlyn is offline
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Originally Posted by bilditup1 View Post
OK great! But then I'm not sure what you meant when you said that "All three "progressive" samples look to be processed incorrectly, with serious problems that are kinda obvious and which should have been spotted before encoding."
I don't know how you browse or test video to check its structure or analyze how you might have to process it, but 99% of the time you don't catch much if you just run it thru a media player -- an experienced eye could see problems right off, even if they don't know the cause precisely.

Most people run Avisynth scripts that cut up a video in different ways (double rate deinterlace with QTGMC or bob() or yadif , ivtc, sRestore, SeparateFields, unblenders, pull tricks like changing the field order, etc.) and watch the frame by frame results in Virtualdub. There's an old Neuron2 guide posted earlier for analyzing video having many odd structures -- not everything, but it's a start: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...-analyze-video. Sometimes trying to fix a piece of thoroughly ruined video isn't worth it. Often it can't be fixed, or it'll just look worse.

The Fox logo is plain 29.97 interlaced, Well, it was formerly interlaced or telecined, then deinterlaced or un-telecined incorrectly resulting in edge shimmer and aliasing on movement, then reinterlaced. The rest of the preview or trailer was originally film speed. At one point it was speeded-up PAL, at another point NTSC telecine or PAL dupes and pulldown added to get NTSC, at another point field-blend deinterlaced (sorry, it can't be repaired), with apparently some shots resized while still not made progressive, etc., etc. In other words, whoever put that trailer together was creatively destructive.

Maybe the actual movie content is built more carefully, but the trailer is best left alone and encoded as 29.97 interlaced even if some sections are blended-field "progressive". It's done often with movies that will never again look like the original. You can use ivtc or QTGMC/sRestore to remove some duped (pulldown) fields but the field blending will still be there, and the Fox logo couldn't be joined to it because the logo is a different structure and frame rate. The logo isn't worth deinterlacing because the field data that formerly described smooth edges during motion are gone forever. The logo can't be ivtc'd with the rest of the trailer because the logo isn't telecined. So you could keep the trailer and logo and correct color or whatnot if you want, but it's interlaced 29.97fps all the way if you want it all in one piece.

Last edited by sanlyn; 10-11-2015 at 09:21 AM.
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  #55  
10-12-2015, 12:00 AM
bilditup1 bilditup1 is offline
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Originally Posted by sanlyn View Post
I don't know how you browse or test video to check its structure or analyze how you might have to process it, but 99% of the time you don't catch much if you just run it thru a media player -- an experienced eye could see problems right off, even if they don't know the cause precisely.
Sorry, so which is it - is difficult to catch issues 99% of the time, or can an experienced eye see problems right off?
Quote:
Most people run Avisynth scripts that cut up a video in different ways (double rate deinterlace with QTGMC or bob() or yadif , ivtc, sRestore, SeparateFields, unblenders, pull tricks like changing the field order, etc.) and watch the frame by frame results in Virtualdub. There's an old Neuron2 guide posted earlier for analyzing video having many odd structures -- not everything, but it's a start: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...-analyze-video. Sometimes trying to fix a piece of thoroughly ruined video isn't worth it. Often it can't be fixed, or it'll just look worse.
Thanks for this - I didn't really have a process for figuring this out before, so I'm gonna get on that, start practicing. Didn't know Neuron2 ever wrote for this site, that's kinda cool.
Quote:
The Fox logo is plain 29.97 interlaced, Well, it was formerly interlaced or telecined, then deinterlaced or un-telecined incorrectly resulting in edge shimmer and aliasing on movement, then reinterlaced. The rest of the preview or trailer was originally film speed. At one point it was speeded-up PAL, at another point NTSC telecine or PAL dupes and pulldown added to get NTSC, at another point field-blend deinterlaced (sorry, it can't be repaired), with apparently some shots resized while still not made progressive, etc., etc. In other words, whoever put that trailer together was creatively destructive.
So in short, a disaster, heh.
Quote:
Maybe the actual movie content is built more carefully, but the trailer is best left alone and encoded as 29.97 interlaced even if some sections are blended-field "progressive". It's done often with movies that will never again look like the original. You can use ivtc or QTGMC/sRestore to remove some duped (pulldown) fields but the field blending will still be there
I'm not quite sure how to remove the dupes with ivtc - if there's no set M-in-N pattern, how would you set CycleR...?
Quote:
, and the Fox logo couldn't be joined to it because the logo is a different structure and frame rate. The logo isn't worth deinterlacing because the field data that formerly described smooth edges during motion are gone forever. The logo can't be ivtc'd with the rest of the trailer because the logo isn't telecined. So you could keep the trailer and logo and correct color or whatnot if you want, but it's interlaced 29.97fps all the way if you want it all in one piece.
What about using VFR for this (via TDecimate). Though, I'm not sure VFR is even possible without deinterlacing...

Anyway, thanks for all your comments - they're educational! Do you have any more comments about the difference between the three caps having seen the Huffyuv versions?
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  #56  
10-12-2015, 12:02 AM
bilditup1 bilditup1 is offline
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Originally Posted by rockovids View Post
Well Said! Very hard for this 50+ year old! Just got into computers about 6 years ago, let alone this VHS to Digital thing. Have had to re-read the guides and posts over and over again. Even walked away from it all for a while! But after getting into it again, it's all slowly sinking in. Most of my stumbling blocks have been been odd/bad luck problems with hardware,(and RFI), forgetting what I have learned here, and mostly trying self-appointed and cheap shortcuts, trying to quickly skim over all the good info, hoping for a quick miracle. But I'm a perfectionist, and keep trying,eventually the challenge will pay off.
Yup, that's been my attitude, too - I like everything to be perfect, and have found that there are no quick fixes much of the time...
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  #57  
10-12-2015, 09:58 AM
sanlyn sanlyn is offline
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Originally Posted by bilditup1 View Post
Sorry, so which is it - is difficult to catch issues 99% of the time, or can an experienced eye see problems right off?
I don't think you have to be so very experienced to see ghosting, interlace combing, aliasing, shimmer, jerky motion, and other stuff. More subtle defects are not so obvious. Look at your ivtc of the Fox logo and it would be pretty careless to miss the motion stutter from trying to ivtc the purely interlaced Logo video. View the original in VirtualDub a frame at a time and you'll see interlace combing on every frame during motion -- apply VDub's yadif or bob filter at double frame rate and watch the output panel: during motion, every "field" will be a different image. You should also be able to see how the thickness of the colored frame border changes during motion (another sign of improper earlier processing). During normal playback, changes in line thickness in the borders and letters produce shimmer effects, or what's often called line twitter. Even if you deinterlace and play it as progressive you'll still see aliasing and line twitter, but each frame will be a different image.

Field blend deinterlacing usually deinterlaces an interlaced frame into two fields, expands the fields to full-size images, then combines the images into one frame. Each pixel in the blended frame contains data from both original fields. They can't be separated.

Quote:
Originally Posted by bilditup1 View Post
Didn't know Neuron2 ever wrote for this site, that's kinda cool.
I don't know that neuron2 ever posted here or not but that article originally appeared on neuron's website, not here. It's no longer online there. The digitalfaq post is a copy of that html web page.

Quote:
Originally Posted by bilditup1 View Post
I'm not quite sure how to remove the dupes with ivtc - if there's no set M-in-N pattern, how would you set CycleR...?
The field blending can't be removed. Most of the time it looks like Cycle=5, CycleR=3, but it varies in different shots. So even if it wasn't field-blending, it wouldn't be so easy to ivtc based on a consistent pattern. Also note that in some movement, many of the blended images are not duplicates from other fields, but some of them are. Frames that can be broken down into separate fields would indicate either interlacing or telecine; fields that can't be broken down into separate images indicate field-blending that can't be fixed. This means that the video went through at least two processing steps: field-blend at one point, then telecine later. You can undo the telecine but not the field-blended frames. This would differ from shot to shot in that trailer.

Shots like that Fox logo were (and still are) often created as interlaced video. Some are simply progressive but encoded as interlaced. Other animations are created at something like 15fps, and then a complex operation is performed with both duplicate frames and telecine applied to attain a certain frame rate. Some logos are created as 23.976 progressive, then pulldown or frame dupes are applied to get 25fps or 29.97. There are many variations. Many of them just look screwed up. When you add film-to-NTSC-to-PAL and other variations, you get real oddities. Sometimes you can fix it, sometimes not. They're trailers and logos that many labs just consider too inconsequential for proper work.

The Foxlogo runs at 29.97fps whether interlaced or single-frame denterlaced with yadif. You can ivtc the other shots at get 23.976 out of it with some blended frames remaining. But you can't combine 29.97 and 23.976 into the same clip (Ah, but see next paragraph below). So the entire trailer including the logo were configured to run at 29.97fps, start to finish. Many trailers are made this way from disparate video segments. You see it all the time in TCM promos shown between main features.

It's possible to partially ivtc the video part to run at 23.976 (with some blends remaining), and to break some rules with the Fox logo and make it run at 23.976 progressive. One could use one of the deinterlacing and blending anti-alias filters that works in a fashion similar to yadif mode=0. This does knock out some fine detail but smooths aliasing (insofar as possible with that crummy logo) and outputs same-rate video. The script also repairs some of the bad splits ("ripples") in a few frames and replaces the last bad broken Fox image with the previous good one. BTW, it doesn't take a keen eye to see the obvious horizontal rips in the original:

Code:
AviSource("Drive:\path\to\empire1_fox.avi")
ConvertToYV12(interlaced=true)
AssumeTFF).santiag(10,4)
ReplaceFramesMC(63,1)
ReplaceFramesMC(146,2)
BadFrames(209,210,blend=false)
QTGMC(InputType=1)
AssumeFPS("NTSC_film")
The attached FoxLogo_1.mp4 has some slight judder from the interpolation that "looks like" field blending. This sometimes works with animation but can make "real" video look kinda blurry-weird when anything moves.

Quote:
Originally Posted by bilditup1 View Post
What about using VFR for this (via TDecimate). Though, I'm not sure VFR is even possible without deinterlacing...
Someone once posted that VFR was a solution for a problem that doesn't exist. It's impossible to edit, often impossible to fix, and many playback systems won't accept it.

Quote:
Originally Posted by bilditup1 View Post
Do you have any more comments about the difference between the three caps having seen the Huffyuv versions?
None that weren't made earlier, except that the 1980's sharpener will blur when reduced too far. It doesn't remove noise, it just softens it -- along with everything else. For almost all captures I leave the sharpener at its default center position. Sometimes you might have to decrease it a bit and resharpen later with better sharpeners. An image that's too soft is difficult to denoise or otherwise filters because many filters soften or obscure detail anyway. Anti-alias filters used on the soft Fox Logo #3 produced a very blurred image, and most of the aliasing was still there.


Attached Files
File Type: mp4 FoxLogo_1.mp4 (4.70 MB, 2 downloads)
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  #58  
10-14-2015, 11:18 PM
bilditup1 bilditup1 is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by sanlyn View Post
I don't think you have to be so very experienced to see ghosting, interlace combing, aliasing, shimmer, jerky motion, and other stuff.
Right, I didn't think that's what you were talking about.
Quote:
More subtle defects are not so obvious. Look at your ivtc of the Fox logo and it would be pretty careless to miss the motion stutter from trying to ivtc the purely interlaced Logo video. View the original in VirtualDub a frame at a time and you'll see interlace combing on every frame during motion -- apply VDub's yadif or bob filter at double frame rate and watch the output panel: during motion, every "field" will be a different image. You should also be able to see how the thickness of the colored frame border changes during motion (another sign of improper earlier processing). During normal playback, changes in line thickness in the borders and letters produce shimmer effects, or what's often called line twitter. Even if you deinterlace and play it as progressive you'll still see aliasing and line twitter, but each frame will be a different image.
Aha, thanks for the detailed explanation on how to identify improper earlier processing and such. For the record, my priority at the time wasn't to present a cleaned-up or final version of the capture. I understand now that it was wrong to just do a simple IVTC on the entire thing, and in the meantime as a stopgap I should have just left it at 29.97 interlaced and supplied a "--tff" argument to x264, but my goal at the time was just to get the entirety of the videos up quickly, so people would be able to evaluate and compare the three captures across the entire clip. I am glad to have been corrected, but that was not carelessness in my evaluation of different parts of the clip - I hadn't really evaluated it at all, and didn't think it would matter or was relevant to my purpose in this thread.
Quote:
Field blend deinterlacing usually deinterlaces an interlaced frame into two fields, expands the fields to full-size images, then combines the images into one frame. Each pixel in the blended frame contains data from both original fields. They can't be separated.
The field blending can't be removed. Most of the time it looks like Cycle=5, CycleR=3, but it varies in different shots. So even if it wasn't field-blending, it wouldn't be so easy to ivtc based on a consistent pattern. Also note that in some movement, many of the blended images are not duplicates from other fields, but some of them are. Frames that can be broken down into separate fields would indicate either interlacing or telecine; fields that can't be broken down into separate images indicate field-blending that can't be fixed. This means that the video went through at least two processing steps: field-blend at one point, then telecine later. You can undo the telecine but not the field-blended frames. This would differ from shot to shot in that trailer.
Shots like that Fox logo were (and still are) often created as interlaced video. Some are simply progressive but encoded as interlaced. Other animations are created at something like 15fps, and then a complex operation is performed with both duplicate frames and telecine applied to attain a certain frame rate. Some logos are created as 23.976 progressive, then pulldown or frame dupes are applied to get 25fps or 29.97. There are many variations. Many of them just look screwed up. When you add film-to-NTSC-to-PAL and other variations, you get real oddities. Sometimes you can fix it, sometimes not. They're trailers and logos that many labs just consider too inconsequential for proper work.
Thanks for all this. 'This means that the video went through at least two processing steps: field-blend at one point, then telecine later. You can undo the telecine but not the field-blended frames. This would differ from shot to shot in that trailer.' - so presumably I'd have to hunt for these by loading an avs with an IVTC function (to get the right frame numbers) and then add something like ReplaceFramesMC() from your script below into that avs.
Quote:
The Foxlogo runs at 29.97fps whether interlaced or single-frame deinterlaced with yadif. You can ivtc the other shots at get 23.976 out of it with some blended frames remaining. But you can't combine 29.97 and 23.976 into the same clip (Ah, but see next paragraph below). So the entire trailer including the logo were configured to run at 29.97fps, start to finish. Many trailers are made this way from disparate video segments. You see it all the time in TCM promos shown between main features.

It's possible to partially ivtc the video part to run at 23.976 (with some blends remaining), and to break some rules with the Fox logo and make it run at 23.976 progressive. One could use one of the deinterlacing and blending anti-alias filters that works in a fashion similar to yadif mode=0. This does knock out some fine detail but smooths aliasing (insofar as possible with that crummy logo) and outputs same-rate video. The script also repairs some of the bad splits ("ripples") in a few frames and replaces the last bad broken Fox image with the previous good one. BTW, it doesn't take a keen eye to see the obvious horizontal rips in the original:

Code:
AviSource("Drive:\path\to\empire1_fox.avi")
ConvertToYV12(interlaced=true)
AssumeTFF().santiag(10,4)
ReplaceFramesMC(63,1)
ReplaceFramesMC(146,2)
BadFrames(209,210,blend=false)
QTGMC(InputType=1)
AssumeFPS("NTSC_film")
The attached FoxLogo_1.mp4 has some slight judder from the interpolation that "looks like" field blending. This sometimes works with animation but can make "real" video look kinda blurry-weird when anything moves.
I did catch said rips - what in this script fixed them? The Santiag aa-er (which I just looked into)? QTGMC? Also, why InputType=1 - when was the video deinterlaced? Or else why signal to QTGMC to process it as progressive?
Quote:
Someone once posted that VFR was a solution for a problem that doesn't exist. It's impossible to edit, often impossible to fix, and many playback systems won't accept it.
I personally have found it fairly useful when dealing with animation that's been badly handled (like in my Avatar project) and has mixed film and video in places other than the credits. It works on the systems I care about (MPC-HC, Roku, and iOS) and I neither need to edit nor fix it anymore once it's been finally encoded. As I don't plan on deleting my original caps, I'm not worried about what happens if that need coming up in the future, either. I'm intrigued, though, at the alternatives to dealing with this, like the 'trick' you posted above for the Fox logo.
Quote:
None that weren't made earlier, except that the 1980's sharpener will blur when reduced too far. It doesn't remove noise, it just softens it -- along with everything else. For almost all captures I leave the sharpener at its default center position. Sometimes you might have to decrease it a bit and resharpen later with better sharpeners. An image that's too soft is difficult to denoise or otherwise filters because many filters soften or obscure detail anyway. Anti-alias filters used on the soft Fox Logo #3 produced a very blurred image, and most of the aliasing was still there.
Will definitely keep sharpen centered by default from now on, thanks for the tip and for your time
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  #59  
10-15-2015, 08:31 AM
sanlyn sanlyn is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bilditup1 View Post
I did catch said rips - what in this script fixed them? The Santiag aa-er (which I just looked into)? QTGMC? Also, why InputType=1 - when was the video deinterlaced? Or else why signal to QTGMC to process it as progressive?
The rips were repaired with ReplaceFramesMC and BadFrames. ReplaceFramesMC uses interpolation to replace a bad frame with motion interpolated from the previous and following frame. It doesn't work so well if there's a lot of action or changing detail, when it often produces odd distortions. BadFrames was used to replace the last visible frame with the previous frame, which works because the video has no motion at that point. If motion problems were involved, you'd have to use filters designed to clean those rips -- which often don't work at all. Sometimes ReplaceFramesMC can be used with a small amount of distortion that isn't noticed if the video moves fast enough. Sometimes, you're just stuck with it as-is.

When used on interlaced video, santiag uses NNEDI3 to produce an effectively progressive video using the same method used by yadif mode=0 but with fancier interpolation to create new frames. It's also sometimes used on video that's deinterlaced first (with somewhat less effective results). There are other anti-alias filters that can use simple low-pass methods (downsize/upsize/blur) or more complicated operations, but they're more destructive.

QTGMC was used to smooth object flutter and line twitter during motion. In default "slow" mode it removes fine detail in "real" video.
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  #60  
10-15-2015, 02:12 PM
bilditup1 bilditup1 is offline
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Very cool stuff. It's been educational, as always
What's your opinion of santiag as a general AAer for progressive video (not deinterlaced - 'natively' progressive)? Or as an AAer/deinterlacer for interlaced animation?
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