#1  
10-04-2019, 10:10 PM
thestarswitcher thestarswitcher is offline
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Hi all!

I've received a very nice ES10 in the mail, and I decided to pull out a tape I wanted to experiment with. The tape in question contains very rare material recorded off the TV, so I'd like to produce a clean image without losing detail.

The initial VCR of recording from 20+ years ago provided a rather grainy picture. I have the ability to invest in an AG-1980, but I want to see where I can get with my current setup. I provided a Lagarith drive link to an example of what I'm dealing with on this tape. Earlier parts of the tape are worse, so I'm hoping to learn with what I can gather here.

(I've cleaned the tape itself with a 70% alcohol pad once or twice in the past, it got off some of the grime)

Setup:

JVC SR-V10U (TBC turned off) -> ES10 -> AVT-8710 -> Capture Card -> PC.

Details worth noting on the VCR= Video Calibration (Off) (I tried on and off, made no difference to me), Picture Control (Edit), Digital R3 (off), Video Stabilization (Off), TBC (Off).

Additional experiments, I tested an Avisynth script:
AVISource("Ocean.avi")
ConverttoYV12(interlaced=true)
AssumeTFF()
QTGMC(Preset="slow")
MCTemporalDenoise(settings="low")

This produced a decent result, but the grain is very excessive still. I don't like the way "medium" turns out, as this produces a somewhat smeary "watercolor" look to it.

File example from the tape is direct from the raw source, only re-encoding was putting this example as a Lagarith file from an original HuffyUV capture.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eiW...ew?usp=sharing

Any and all efforts and help are deeply appreciated.

Thank you!
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  #2  
10-05-2019, 03:27 PM
josem84 josem84 is offline
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Don't use anything lower than 99% IPA to clean your tapes. I'd rather use the noise removal circuitry within your S-VHS unit instead of including the Panasonic in the chain. There's no point to include that in your chain having the AVT-8710 already. Use it only if your tape suffers from severe tearing that can't be sorted out with your S-VHS. The ES10 can degrade the image quality.


Quote:
Originally Posted by thestarswitcher View Post
Hi all!

I've received a very nice ES10 in the mail, and I decided to pull out a tape I wanted to experiment with. The tape in question contains very rare material recorded off the TV, so I'd like to produce a clean image without losing detail.

The initial VCR of recording from 20+ years ago provided a rather grainy picture. I have the ability to invest in an AG-1980, but I want to see where I can get with my current setup. I provided a Lagarith drive link to an example of what I'm dealing with on this tape. Earlier parts of the tape are worse, so I'm hoping to learn with what I can gather here.

(I've cleaned the tape itself with a 70% alcohol pad once or twice in the past, it got off some of the grime)

Setup:

JVC SR-V10U (TBC turned off) -> ES10 -> AVT-8710 -> Capture Card -> PC.

Details worth noting on the VCR= Video Calibration (Off) (I tried on and off, made no difference to me), Picture Control (Edit), Digital R3 (off), Video Stabilization (Off), TBC (Off).

Additional experiments, I tested an Avisynth script:
AVISource("Ocean.avi")
ConverttoYV12(interlaced=true)
AssumeTFF()
QTGMC(Preset="slow")
MCTemporalDenoise(settings="low")

This produced a decent result, but the grain is very excessive still. I don't like the way "medium" turns out, as this produces a somewhat smeary "watercolor" look to it.

File example from the tape is direct from the raw source, only re-encoding was putting this example as a Lagarith file from an original HuffyUV capture.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eiW...ew?usp=sharing

Any and all efforts and help are deeply appreciated.

Thank you!
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  #3  
10-05-2019, 04:03 PM
keaton keaton is offline
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Search the forum for things like RemoveDirtMC, RemoveSpotsMC, & MDG2. Many posts have been made by sanlyn, and probably others, who have a lot of avisynth script examples showing how to uses these functions. These functions are defined in .avs files that are attached in various posts on this forum. There should be a post by sanlyn showing the other Avisynth plugins you need to have in your plugins folder to support these scripts, as well as some Visual C++ libraries you may also need (I think).

They are often used in conjunction with builtin avisynth functions that separate the even and odd fields of the interlaced video, then using weave to recombine them after running various combinations of these functions on those fields.

QTGMC is really good at denoising. I think these RemoveXXXXXXMC functions are similar in some ways, but is worth you having in your toolbox and experimenting with them. I think they are better at removing comets/dropouts than QTGMC. They are both great options for cleaning things. Only you can decide what you like best. It is certainly worth your time giving them a try. Hard to describe what's different, but you can see for yourself by running the same clip through both. I personally think the Remove scripts are not as strong as QTGMC can be, but it can still provide some great results. Using separate fields and weave with these RemoveXXXXXMC functions doesn't truly deinterlace like QTGMC does, and may appear less "intrusive" but still quite good at removing things that are anomalies, noise, spots, etc.

Best of luck. If you got QTGMC setup, you may be most of the way there to get these RemoveXXXXXMC type scripts to run.

Last edited by keaton; 10-05-2019 at 04:16 PM.
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  #4  
10-05-2019, 04:23 PM
hodgey hodgey is offline
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My experience is that it's better to put the noise reduction before deinterlacing in avisynth scripts.

MCTemporalDenoise is good for heavy noise, but it can easily smear things a bit much depending on the settings.

Personally I mostly use either denoising in QTGMC mostly with
Code:
denoiser="knlmeanscl"
(requires a recent version) or smdegrain (again usually with knmleanscl as the underlying denoiser, which requires a recent version.) QTGMC and other plugins have a ton of knobs to tweak, like thSAD, blocksize, noiseTR, etc. I know many users here like to stick with older versions of avisynth plugins though.
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The following users thank hodgey for this useful post: msgohan (01-20-2020)
  #5  
10-07-2019, 05:44 PM
sanlyn sanlyn is offline
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[QUOTE=thestarswitcher;64364]I'd like to produce a clean image without losing detail.[/QOUTE]
With the high level of noise and distortion seen here, along with what looks like tracking issues in the original recorder, your chances of not losing any detail are indeed slim.

Grain isn't the only problem. Grain is only about 1/3 the noise, which also consists of RF noise (herringbone and thin rolling hum bars, both of which cause distortion of many visual elements). There are several bad horizontal dropouts -- I fixed a couple of them but the others are just too severe and change shape and position over too many frames. I see thick edge halos, chroma smear, bleeding red, and colors with unexpected peaks and valleys in its histograms. Most of the color info is below the midrange, which is odd for a video with so much water, sky, and ice. A grayscale rendition of the frames has an unusually dim and grimy look. It's reminiscent of results from an EasyCrap device or one of its many clones -- but that's a guess, since the original recorder could also be at fault. The source itself seems to be riddled with ingrained digital artifacts that aren't usually found in analog tape.

I found it more practical to use two scripts for processing. To fight off the heavy grain and chroma noise I used TemporalDegrain in the first script along with VirtuaLDub's FSN plugin filter (Frequency Noise Suppressor) for the herringbone. Both filters are slow memory hogs, so I ran them in the first script, which I saved as interlaced Lagarith YV12.

I ran a second script with QTGMC and the other filters. QTGMC doesn't help very much with RF noise. I used QTGMC to smooth out much of the source's line shimmer, aliasing, and what acted like digital compression noise but could just as well have had other causes. FluxSmoothT and RemoveDirtMC helped a bit with some of the rolling hum noise. The herringbone and odd colors look like the problems you had with some earlier posts. I suspect the capture card for some of this, but you've avoided naming the capture device so I give up guessing about it.

I used ReplaceFramesMC2 to fix two of the horizontal dropouts (thick, dark gray ripples). Object motion made more repairs impractical. ReplaceFramesMC2 and ReplaceFramesSimple affect the sound track, so I had to save the audio and re-dub it later with Avisynth's AudioDub() function.

Thank you for the samples. But, again, the forum requests that you don't post samples offsite. When your samples disappear from that site your forum thread will be a useless waste of space. I took the liberty of editing out two short sections from your 488mb sample. The edits are attached as Ocean1_sample_edit1.avi and Ocean1_sample_edit2.avi, both in the original Lagarith lossless YUY2. For those who don't have Lagarith, it's a good idea to keep it around and use it. The handy-dandy installer can be found at Lagarith's home site at https://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html.

Below are copies of Avisynth scripts #1 and #2. I'm badly cramped for time tonight because of a big DVD project due, but allow me a day or two to clean up and post some detailed notes on the processing. An interlaced encode of the two scripts is attached as "Ocean1_tdg3_29.97i.mp4". Change the path statements in your scripts to match locations in your system.

Script #1:
Code:
AviSource("I:\forum\faq\thestarswitcher\B\Ocean1.avi") 

AssumeTFF()
SeparateFields()
FixVHSOversharp(20,16,12)
FixVHSOversharp(20,8,4)
FixVHSOversharpL(20,12,8)
Weave()

ConvertToYV12(interlaced=true)
SeparateFields()
TemporalDegrain(degrain=3)
Weave()

LoadVirtualDubPlugin("D:\virtualDub\plugins\fsn.vdf","FrequencyNoiseSuppressor",1)
ConvertToRGB32(interlaced=true,matrix="rec601")
FrequencyNoiseSuppressor(70,70,2,1,1)
ConvertToYV12(interlaced=true)
Crop(8,8,-10,0).AddBorders(8,4,10,4)
### --- Output is saved in Lagarith YV12 as "Ocean1_Step1.avi" --- ###
Script #2:
Code:
AviSource("I:\forum\faq\thestarswitcher\B\Ocean1_Step1.avi") 
a1=last
Save_Audio = a1
a1

AssumeTFF()
ConvertToYV12(interlaced=true)
QTGMC(border=true)
vInverse()

###--- routine for fixing 2 bad dropout ripples. ---###
###--- Frame numbers are deinterlaced numbers.   ---###
s1=last
b0=s1
b01=s1.ReplaceFramesMC2(277,8).Crop(0,124,0,-340)
b02=Overlay(b0,b01,x=0,y=124) 
s2=ReplaceFramesSimple(s1,b02,mappings="[277 284]")
s2

ReplaceFramesMC2(1028,16)
FluxSmoothT()
MergeChroma(aWarpSharp2(depth=20).aWarpSharp2(depth=10))

###--- restore interlace ---###
SeparateFields().SelectEvery(4,0,3).Weave()

###--- restore original audio ---###
s3=AudioDub(last,Save_Audio)
return s3


Attached Files
File Type: avi Ocean1_sample_edit1.avi (93.79 MB, 33 downloads)
File Type: avi Ocean1_sample_edit2.avi (93.16 MB, 19 downloads)
File Type: mp4 Ocean1_tdg3_29.97i.mp4 (28.64 MB, 23 downloads)
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The following users thank sanlyn for this useful post: captainvic (10-08-2019)
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Tags
cleanup, es10, grain, noise, tbc

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