How to remove flashing date/time from VHS capture?
 

All,

I've successfully captured a VHS tape and it looks great, however, the date and time flash on the bottom right hand corner. It appears that the person videoing (back in 1996) didn't turn that "feature" off.

I've done some research and the most I've found so far is that I can either crop the video OR blur out the flashing.

What I'm hoping for is that there's a plugin (for Adobe Premier Pro) or application that can remove the flashing date/time; I'm hopeful because there is data for the application to potentially sample as the date/time stamp doesn't remain on the screen the entire time.

Does anyone know if this is possible? Maybe there's another option that I haven't found? Open to suggestions and thank you!

No, Not without damaging the area that displays the clock. It is possible to do a frame by frame manual restoration with minimum damage but it could take you years.

I had hoped this wasn't the case (because I did have some of the background) but understand. It looks like the crop method produces a cleaner looking video than the blur method.

Thanks again.

Maybe it could be possible to interpolate the area of the video that has the flashing date?

That's what I was hoping for; any idea how?

No. :disagree:

All that happens is you'll replace a distinct clock with an amorphous blurry blobs that's more distracting that the clock was. Humans (all animals, actually, like birds and cats) can ignore static or semi-static objects -- aka a clock on screen -- while they cannot ignore periphery that moves, wobbles, wiggle, fades in/out, etc. We just can't.

You screw up video when you do this.

Don't do this.

It's part of the video now. At best, you can crop out that entire are of the video, but you'll lose video to hide the onscreen text, logo, whatever.

Makes sense.

I decided to zoom and crop the video to hide the time/date stamp on the screen. Thankfully you can't really tell that it's gone as it's a home video (so no super tight shots)

Loosing 20% or more of the picture information just to hide a time display? Not to mention the blurriness due to fewer scan lines, Wow.

Something like this?

Depending on how much action is in the video and the flash rates and duty cycle you might be able to kludge a repair of sorts using a NLE. Placing a copy of the video under it offset by the flash duration. So the underlying video shown no date time when the top video shows date/time. In the date/time area only, luma key in the underlying video. This will replace the date/time with the video offset video in the date/time spot. Adding a bit of blur might help make any motion a bit less obvious.

Not a great solution, especially for video with fast camera moves and motion, but it may be better than the losses induced by cropping/scaling.

I should have said mask. Cover with black, a photo "crop".

Zooming is ... ugh. There go any quality you may have had, especially with interlaced VHS. What a mess. :sick:

So, the upside to doing things digitally is that I can provide/keep multiple file formats and let people choose which one they want to watch.

This is a family wedding that was shot on a standard camcorder of the time. Obviously, with the quality not being the greatest to start with (and my capture setup being "ok") I need all the resolution I can get.

I do agree that the cropped version does look worse, however, some people might deal with "worse" to not have to watch the time/date blinking.

So I tried this method. When it works, it works VERY well. But the problem is that it doesn't really work. At all. There's a few spots where you can't tell the date/time was there at all.

But most of the short clip I did, you can absolutely tell that there was something there. And (someone else in this thread mentioned this) when it's done poorly it's *even worse* than just having the time/date blink in the bottom.

My game plan now that I know what I know is to render two files; one with the date/time blinking and another with the date/time cropped out (and yes, I know the quality tanks; see my above reply).

A big THANK YOU to everyone who offered help/suggestions/etc and if anyone has any other ones, I'm all ears.

Cay you post maybe 10 typical seconds of the video for others to play with?

It can be done, well effectively masked beyond the perception of most casual observers but it's not especially easy, it's time consuming work.

My method involves working in AE (there's a few tricks you can use, it doesn't have to be frame-by-frame, but it's a slow process) then a bit of finishing that my recipe is judicious use of Topaz and various extra AE stages. I did get an "80%" quick job once blowing out the OSG then using it at a luma matte but that was a pretty quick job to mask it. You'll need a fair chunk of PC horsepower once you start playing with advanced bits in AE with real-time previews and adjustments.

You can't get back what's not there, but yes it's possible to make it practically imperceptible, you'll just need a lot of time, a bit of experience and pricy software if you don't have it to hand.

I'll see if I can get clearance to post a sample of how I've done it before.

If you post up a few seconds I'll see what I can do.

As requested, here is a link to the video only.

https://youtu.be/46SLp57UVPc

It's not a minute (as requested) but there's enough movement and flashing that it's a good starting point.

That bit of a very simple task in AE.

Trouble is the rest of the footage, anything with action taking place 'behind' the clock? That's the challenge!

Is the whole video the Jan 1, 12 AM flashing, or does the date change?

At least if it was the actual date/time of the event it would service some purpose.

Agreed; from the little I tested AE does a great job when the camera isn't moving. When it is... AE makes some interesting choices that (sometimes) look much worse than just a flashing clock.

The ENTIRE video has the same date and time flashing.

If it were the date and time of the event, I wouldn't care about it at all. But, the flashing time/date stamp really makes this a perfect example of 90's recording.

Then the simplest fix might be to overlay the date/time with something useful such as names and date as in the attached example. This is a simple overlay of the video with a masking gray rectangle and a still title.

A more elegant solution would the to create a precise mask of the date time and use it rather than the rectangle.

However, some video AGC effects can be seen in your posted video immediately to the right of the date/time - the scan lines brightness drops a bit when the date/time is displayed. This may be a product of the capture device used and if so using a capture device without AGC enabled may eliminate it.