Video8 and Hi8 capture workflow?
 

Hi all,

Really appreciate all the information on this site and guidance from lordsmurf and all.

I'm starting a transfer project of a pile of tapes that were tucked away at my parents', around 40 tapes in total with a mix of Video8 and Hi8 tapes. The final videos will be shared with family primarily through private YouTube playlists, and possibly DVD. I'll keep a backed up hard drive with the masters. I plan to upscale the videos destined for YouTube to HD, just to make use of it's higher HD bitrate.

My chain is a Sony TRV65E camcorder -> AED CDM660 (as TBC when needed) -> ATI AIW 9000 Pro AGP & M-Audio 2496 -> VirtualDub HuffYUV, running on XP SP3.

I've set up the levels as best I can, with a little dip below 16 for the blacks and the highlights no brighter than 235 (set with crop on).

I have had a few issues with the colour however, the saturation seems too high but unlike with the histogram I'm not entirely sure how to make sure I don't clip the chroma signal, if that's a risk? So I've wound the levels Saturation control down to 100 (from the 128 mid point) as this looks more reasonable. I'd rather trust a graph but I haven't found anything that can be checked realtime while capturing in VirtualDub. However, viewing the video in a vectorscope after capture seemed to show that all colour information was retained and appeared to be recoverable in colour correction.

Attached is a sample of the capture with one of the worst offending clips - highly saturated reds yet still apparently legal on the VirtualDub histogram. The original recording was over-exposed, too yellow, and the reds were blown out. I've tried my best to recover it, but appreciate the over-exposure is not recoverable!

The second attachment is after I've run it through QTGMC deinterlacer and a little colour correction in Resolve, then cropped and transcoded to H264 in Handbrake. (my thought was to store the high quality H264 cropped, and then if I need to put it back on DVD, I'll add borders to bring it back to 720 x 576)

I was wondering if I could get any opinion on the quality/colour, and if it seems in the ballpark? I don't particularly want to spend hours on each scene but am happy to make a basic overall adjustment for each tape if it's adequate.

Does this all seem like I'm on the right track?

Thanks all!
Dave P

The "before" was perfectly fine, very accurate.
The "after" is soft/blurry, undersaturated, and blue shift.

You know what this means, right? .... You're color correcting against an UNCALIBRATED monitor. You're making color worse, not better.

You're using the QTGMC preset=Slower, aren't you? Don't do that. It softens video too much. I hate that preset. Instead you preset=Faster, and don't do SelectEven/Odd (decimate from 50i>25p).

For your own sanity, don't crop. Mask (aka, cover overscan with black). Cropping cannot be arbitrary, and must be done in 4x3 increments with the 5x4 palette. Otherwise you'll screw up the aspect ratio (AR).

The capture looks good. :)

It's the post-capture that needs improvement.

Thanks for checking it out LS.

Now I realise I had a little 'night-shift' enabled on my Mac like an idiot so the display was warmer, my mistake!

I can choose a Rec709 colorspace for my MacBook display which apparently would help, and understand I'd need to properly calibrate it to do anything serious.

I'm not fussed about super accurate so would rather trust a histogram or RGB parade to get the colour temperature in the right ballpark. Can Avisynth's autowhite help with this or does it tend to be too heavy handed?

I was using QTGMC 'slow' and yes I did think it looked a little soft. I'll give faster a go, thanks.

Point taken on the masking, I was probably trying to overcomplicate things with that!

Regarding the colour saturation, does this seem normal? The red and blue channels certainly were going over 235 when viewed on a colour histogram, does this matter? Or is it just the luma histogram that counts when capturing?

Many thanks!

autowhite can help, but also harm. Test, verify.

Color on 'before" seemed fine, otherwise it would have been noted.