Diagonal line noise on VHS video? Luma noise?
 

I've got my set-up, er, set up (after having had my equipment repaired).

So: AG-1980 ---> DV TBC-3000 ---> BVP4+ ---> Radeon AIW 9800 Pro --> VirtualDub.

However I'm having some trouble - there appear to be some diagonal lines in the picture. Usually these are difficult to see in screenshots but I managed to snag a good one just now - take a look. This persists across tapes of all kinds, and even when the TBC and proc amp are removed from the signal chain. The AG-1980 was just repaired by TGrant so I'd be surprised if that was the culprit here. Thoughts? Is this video cable corruption? Power interference? I've recently replaced the fan on the AIW 9800 with a quieter one with a copper HS - could that possibly have anything to do with it? Or is this just 'how it is' with video and I should try to filter it out later?

Looks like herringbone noise. I would try swapping cables first.

You can remove that with fanfilter plugin for avisynth

So I've since tried four different S-Video cables and my Hi8 deck. It's persisted throughout. Does this mean there's something faulty with my breakout cable? Or with my AIW 9800? That would be annoying...

Thanks jmac - I'd rather not resort to filters until I have to, but appreciate the tip nonetheless :)

It's a bit unrealistic to expect quality VHS transfers without post-process filtering of some kind (those mild gray hum bars aren't the only wrong with the image you posted).

The fanfilter plugin isn't likely to clear the noise, but anyone can try it if they like. I gave up on fanfilter years ago. Anyone who can change my mind would be enthusiastically supported.
:)

If this disturbance appears on all your tapes, you can suspect the capture card, environmental electrical interference, or the VCR. What most of us would do is try a different VCR, even if it isn't a good one, as a start at eliminating one of the most obvious suspects.

It's difficult to advise about FM hash, hum bars, herringbone noise, etc., without seeing some actual video. I've seen similar noise on many captures over the years. If it can't be avoided during capture or if it's part of the broadcast noise often seen on VHS recordings, or on tapes improperly stored under hot/humid conditions or near large magneto assemblies like subwoofers, it can sometimes be cleaned up after capture.

Did this problem start after you replaced the card's fan? Does the quieter fan have the same cooling capacity?

Herringbone is my guess, too. But it's hard to tell with just an image. This is a case where a small video sampl helps.

Are you sure that this noise isn't just on the original tape? It probably is, especially if this a recording from analog cable. The late 90s were especially bad, as analog cable lines tended to be overloaded. (The digital MPEG/H264 broadcast era has corrected this.)

With old VHS signals, processing is often a must. Even retail tapes had tons of errors.

FM and power noise can sometimes be a problem where you live. For example, the TVA power grid used in middle Tennessee is often not nice to DataVideo TBCs.

Thanks for chiming in guys.

So this persists across several retail VHS tapes - no TV recordings yet - a couple of Video8 recordings, plus a few different cables, with or without the proc amp or TBC in the chain. It's actually easiest to see with a blank screen, I realized.
Sanlyn - I did make one short test recording while the stock (incessantly loud) fan was still on there, but there is so much wrong with the picture that it's difficult to see the effect I'm describing (that was with my pre-TGrant-recapping AG-1980). There is some chroma noise there, though, that kinda-sorta matches the shape of the pattern I'm describing, so I'll try to excerpt a part of it for here later, once I get home, along with one or two of my more recent attempts.

In the meantime, it seems to me that it's the card, the fan, or this electrical interference that's causing this - unless all five cables I'm using are defective. If it is EMI - would something like this help? I use it to eliminate hum on one of my T-amps.

EMI wouldn't cause mid- or high-frequency noise like herringbone or crosshatching, which is more likely juiced by higher-frequency RF or FM interference or RF/FM in the a.c. power source. Audio hum is low-frequency sub-120Hz grounding defect noise, usually at 60Hz.

I wouldn't think the device you refer to would help, and it appears to work only with 3-prong a.c. connections. A more comprehensive power source cleaner would be more effective, like those that come with the better backup-UPS power supplies such as those from APC. If you decide to try those or true a.c. power cleaners, don't go anywhere near hyped brands like Monster Cable unless the only thing you want is a rip-off. Some users attach RF filters on their connecting cables -- that can be a little iffy, but some say it works and it's not that expensive.

I have had this issue for a few years now...Just click my username, and then click posts regarding "RFI". (my latest turned into 5 pages of replies, got side-tracked into Huffyuv but by the end I posted video of RFI examples), Very faint Wiggly/Giggly lines, sometimes going northwest to southwest then changing north east to southeast..very frustrating!

Knowing it is not inherent to original tape!...It actually made me walk away from the whole thing for a few years! It all boiled down to my S-Video cables picking up RFI/EMI noise on the original ATI 9600 INPUT Cable.(From VCR)..I had to attach clip-on "RFI Chokes"
http://www.radioshack.com/radioshack...e/2730105.html around my S-Video cables.

Wound up purchasing expensive, but TRULY SHIELDED, Bluejeans S-video cables just to be sure. (recommended by sanlyn)
http://www.bluejeanscable.com/store/svideo/index.htm
But even then ,my RFI problem required me to clip on 4 of these chokes around the Bluejeans cables!

And nowdays there are so many possible devices emmitting RFI ,There is no telling where this is coming from. A simple trial-by -error test for your problem is to connect your VCR to a TV or Monitor (even with Yellow composite connectors) if possible, and see how that looks. I suspected everything,from my VCR to PC ATI Card for a while, But found out the problem RFI was not the Hardware, but was with the S-Video Cables picking up outside interference, (in my particular environment)..Please note that Radio-shack chokes is an example only of the type that will fit over S-video cable...do some googling for cheaper price of same type of choke! And yes, try to upload a 5 second .AVI video file of your problem, this site now supports up to (99Mb?) of direct video upload, as long as your DSL is fast enough to upload within 10 mins, otherwise it will time out!..If it times out,then you have to become a premium member,and then read requirements for uploading video,thru FTP server.

BTW, I found out that possible "RFI" shows up better against a White (Winter/Snow) background/source tape, as opposed to a darker background tape!

Don't want to bug you but - can you make a specific recommendation with respect to a UPS or power cleaner?

I was actually going to ask if I should get blue jeans, which I already use for audio, but wanted to avoid the extra expense if possible. Thanks for the recommendations re testing and the ferrite chokes.

Attached is an x264 encoded at crf13 showing the issue happening without anything being played at all, when my source VCR is on but play has not yet been pressed. Very easy to see, especially once you go fullscreen.

Before anyone could advise in detail, judging from the sample posted above, we'd need the answers to a few questions:

Do you always capture VHS to YV12 color?
Do you always capture VHS to low-bitrate lossy h264?
Do you encode interlaced video as progressive during capture, or after, and why?
Noise isn't visible until zero-black is raised to about RGB64. How much of the noise in your sample would you estimate to be low-bitrate h264 compression noise? Do you always work with video on monitors or TV with high gamma settings?

Did you try this test with no VCR connected? If the only component that was actually powerd up is the captue card, then the noise is in the card.

Are you using virtualdub to capture?

LOL, I am not a complete noob, if that's what you're thinking:

• Captured in YUY2; had to do a ConvertToYV12() in Avisynth because this is a requirement for x264 - it expects YV12 input and produces YV12 output. I am realizing now that I didn't need to compress the video because of the rather generous allowances for attachments at this forum, plus the ftp. For the record, I don't think there's a VFW version of x264 that can be used with VirtualDub for capture.
• See last comment. I did not intend for the video to come to such a low-bitrate, but that's what crf-13, which is in fact a fairly high/borderline overkill crf setting, resulted in.
• It was captured as interlaced. When converting to x264, I forgot to enable interlaced mode. Actually, I did two tests, one with each VCR, the first one with MagicYUV - that's the file I converted to x264 and posted here - and the second one with Huffyuv. I'll attach both files here, though I doubt many of you are using MagicYUV. They look basically the same even though different VCRs were used.
• I watched the x264 video again. Frankly, I think it looks identical to the source file. I have made an ICC profile for this monitor with a different computer using an i1 Display Pro III and i1Profiler, but haven't installed it on this computer yet - just forgot - and was unaware that the gamma curve was that high on it pre-calibration (would be news to me, actually...)
• I did try the test with the VCRs off - I tried with both of them - and the overlay screen in VirtualDub was completely black. I guess we have our answer...?

Yes.

I use pretty much what is S.O.P. in the forum guidelines:

VCR's: AG-1980, PV-S4670, PV-4664
cables: s-video (BlueJeans YC-2), composite when required (AR Performance Series RCA or BlueJeans/Belden 1695A)
AVT8710 (when required) or Panasonic DMR-ES10 or DMR-ES15 pass-thru
SignVideo PA-100 proc amp (sometimes) or VirtualDub hook-in to Levels controls in ATI capture drivers
AIW 7500 Radeon AGP or AIW 9600XT Radeon AGP
VirtualDub capture -> lossless huffyuv YUY2 interlaced AVI
post processing: lossless Lagarith YUY2, YV12, or RGB as required with Avisynth and/or VirtuaLDub
Interlaced video is output to final delivery as DVD or BluRay, interlaced.
Telecined or blended-frame video is unblended/inverse telecined in post processing. The final encode is with 3:2 pulldown.

From what I can see in the processed sample, the fluttery moire pattern is moving pretty fast, and is not consistent. The last time I saw that kind of noise it was an ungrounded cooling fan power line in a DVD recorder.

[EDIT] With the lossless original it's easier to see and judge the RF noise more clearly. Same comment on the noise as before.

Regardless of the colorspace or compressor used for capture, it's usually best to submit cuts from original, unaltered samples.

Actually, since it's trivial to convert to HuffYUV... (see attached)

Ahyup. That would be the last arrow in the quote, bud :)

How long are they, if you don't mind my asking?

Aha. Did you see the vertical grey line on the right edge of the video? Is that also consistent with an ungrounded fan? AFAIK the fan on this card should be grounded :question:

And have you ever had to use ferrite chokes to eliminate noise of this kind, like rockovids did?

two 3-ft, one 6-ft, one 4.5-foot spare.


I don't know. But I noticed the grayish border. Didn't bother me. A real input signal might make a difference. How that replacement cooler operates is unknown. If the moire and floating hash existed in your captures before the fan was replaced, the new fan didn't help.

You mean, that it looks to you like something caused by improper grounding somewhere. Does that mean that one of the audiohum eliminators (like you said, around 60Hz) actually could work?

Yup, I will do that moving forward. Only compressed it because I thought I had to :smack:

Audiohum elimiinators, whatever you call them, have no effect on capture cards themselves. How would you mount it to the card? That noise doesn't look like 60Hz hum anyway, it's moving too fast and unsteady. 60Hz hum bars are slower-moving horizontal grayish bars that slowly float or up or down. They vary in speed but they don't flutter like higher-frequency RF noise.

Whether you have something wrong with the card itself or whether the RFI is afflicting your entire PC power supply is anyone's guess. What I would suggest is feeding cleaner power to the PC itself. Some cheap RF filter chokes attached to the a.c. power line might do the trick, if that RF is coming from your home a.c. sockets. That would be the least expensive trial I can think of for a start. Sometimes a home air conditioner on the same circuit can create a lot of power line noise.

Yup, I will do that moving forward. Only compressed it because I thought I had to :smack:[/quote]

Cool. And you haven't had to put ferrite chokes anywhere? Not even on the purple breakout box's cable?

OK, so linked here is
(a) a part of the one capture I did before sending my VCR to get fixed and replacing the fan on the video card
(b) same part of the same source after the VCR was fixed and the fan replaced.

A few notes on the caps:

• First cap looks pretty God awful, so I'm not sure how much you can learn from it.
• First cap was made with a newish AVT-8710 in the chain that I have since returned. Now using a TBC-3000 that I definitely overpaid for.
• First cap had 8px cropped off the right and the bottom to avoid capturing head noise on the bottom and whatever that crap was on the right. I planned to add 4px to all sides of the video later in Avisynth. Going forward I decided it was not appropriate to cap this way, but wanted to explain why the vid is 632x472.
• The original caps were in MagicYUV but I converted them to Huffyuv before uploading. As they are both lossless, I don't think this should matter, but I thought this might be worth pointing out.

Links are to Dropbox - I have not yet asked for ftp access; going to get on that now.

It would be for the computer's PSU. But if that isn't the issue, then I won't bother, heh.

Yeah, I thought the powerline networking I'm using may have been causing issues. But after disconnecting all of them around the house, the issue persisted :(

For ferrite chokes - do these look good?

They look OK, appear to be the same thing referred to earlier. But I think you can get a better price if you shop around:
http://www.amazon.com/Ferrite-CB-Rad.../dp/B009U14CVI.

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.