Restoring hi8 tapes
 

I am capturing some old hi8 tapes and Im struggling to find out how to improve the quality. For playback I use a DRV-TRV235E, which works great, and for capture I use the hauppauge usb-live2.

The problem is that the capture looks too dark to me and the colors a bit flat. I use the camcorder's lcd for reference and there the image looks much more lively so to say.

I have added a sample. Sometimes the images gets really dark and it becomes hard to see any detail. Especially at the end of the clip

Is the recording done incorrectly or can I fix this in avisynth? If so how? Something with the levels and gamma?

I am a complete newbie to this and avisynth is still somewhat puzzling. From what I get from the histograms, the image should be within bounds. But I may be reading them wrong.

Also two other things I just noticed. When I trimmed a clip in virtualdub to share here I applied huffyuv again otherwise the filesize would just be enormous. Is that ok? And I just noticed that audio is out of sync. I will have to look into that as well...

If trimming a clip in Virtualdub, select Video, then Direct Stream copy and it will save the clip in current video format.

Thanks! Here is a reupload. That makes a difference in filesize.

How does it look on your TV?

I have the same card and never experienced this behavior, but I only capture s-vhs tapes recorded from digital TV broadcast.

The histogram is within the proper limits; however is very flat in a large region.

Attachment 13454

You can use a filter like HDRAGC to "improve" the dark regions, but be careful because it may introduce ugly effects.

Attached an example, using also some denoise and sharpening.

The main problem with the clip is that the important detail, the people, is underexposed partly because the white handkerchief and then the bright window affected the camera's exposure. A solution would have been to switch the camera to manual exposure at time of shooting. Many home movies are plagued with this problem. We can't "restore" dark detail which was not captured by the camera.

Thanks! Your script is also really helpful to get me started on avisynth. I have attached a recording of my phone of the camcorder to get a sense of the difference. I also watched my capture on the TV yesterday and it actually looks pretty good.



I also think that it may just be the recording that is not that great.


So am I correct that the capture is ok, and that I can only alter things in avisynth?