Go Back    Forum > Featured > General Discussion

Reply
 
LinkBack Thread Tools
  #1  
08-23-2015, 09:07 PM
darktree darktree is offline
Free Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2015
Location: Kirkland, WA
Posts: 6
Thanked 1 Time in 1 Post
Hello all, I have captured some old home movies to my hard drive, and now need to clean them up (hopefully with a filter or two in virtualdub or after fx).

The problem is the video has an inconsistent vertical jitter that wraps the top of the video down to the bottom about every half second to full second. I was wondering if there were any filters you guys use for virtualdub that can recognize these jittery/vertically wrapped frames and move them into place.

It is a 1.5 hour video, and this happens for about half of it, so scrubbing through 100,000 frames just isn't going to happen. I tried to do what I could with the VCR tracking, but it didn't improve the vertical jitter.

Please see uploaded video sample I put on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfsotonUjRM
Edit: also I attached the raw video.


and also I attached a screenshot of the troublesome vertically wrapping jitter.

Thank you very much of anyone who can point me in the right direction!


Attached Images
File Type: jpg jitter.jpg (79.1 KB, 86 downloads)
Attached Files
File Type: avi test.avi (1.90 MB, 54 downloads)
Reply With Quote
The following users thank darktree for this useful post: yellowprinting (08-23-2015)
Someday, 12:01 PM
admin's Avatar
Ads / Sponsors
 
Join Date: ∞
Posts: 42
Thanks: ∞
Thanked 42 Times in 42 Posts
  #2  
08-24-2015, 04:29 AM
sanlyn sanlyn is offline
Premium Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: N. Carolina and NY, USA
Posts: 3,648
Thanked 1,307 Times in 982 Posts
Welcome to the forum.

Your UTUbe link is marked "Private" and couldn't be viewed.

It's difficult to suggest anything specific other than a tbc and a VCR alignment job, but how are you capturing these videos? They can't be viewed in some media players, some of the data says the files are h264 encoded at low bitrates, other data sez the video header info tries to read your sample as a YUVY colorspace using a Panasonic DV decompressor, VCR's play interlaced video but yours sample is progressive.

What VCR are you using? What is your capture device? What format are you capturing to? Why is your capture deinterlaced?
Reply With Quote
The following users thank sanlyn for this useful post: darktree (08-24-2015)
  #3  
08-24-2015, 05:39 PM
darktree darktree is offline
Free Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2015
Location: Kirkland, WA
Posts: 6
Thanked 1 Time in 1 Post
Thank you for the warm welcome.
  • Marked the utube video as public. sorry!
  • I deinterlaced the video in virtualdub so that we could just highlight the issue at hand that I cannot fix.
  • Showbiz 2 is the software used to capture (directly to mpg)
  • sometimes use Movivo if Showbiz 2 gives me problems
  • virtualdub used to convert to avi using x264 codec
  • Magnavox MWD2206 DVD VCR Combo is the VHS player I am using
  • The VHS in question is a homemade VHS made in 1989 comprised of 8mm footage shot in the '60s to the '80s
Reply With Quote
  #4  
08-24-2015, 06:13 PM
sanlyn sanlyn is offline
Premium Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: N. Carolina and NY, USA
Posts: 3,648
Thanked 1,307 Times in 982 Posts
Thank you for the information. Very complete.

First, the bad news (well, everybody gets bad news around here, it's Standard Issue, LOL!). Considering your combo tape player, your capture device and capture software, then add capturing to lossy encoded formats, apparent bob deinterlace discarding frames, and lossy video and lossy audio re-encode using very low bitrates for a video with camera motion, I (we) would assume that if you always capture your tapes in this manner, you're objective isn't quality. Not everyone is inclined to go through the trouble to get higher quality video. It's not important to many, and so be it.

That aside, if your video was still interlaced and not missing half of its original frames, it might be possible to ascertain a little more information about what's going wrong (for instance, did both the even and odd fields both jump, or was it just the odd or even fields, or did each field jump at different times?). Other than that, one could point to a lot of causes. Combo players are among the worst tracking players on the planet, for one. Likely it's not being done by the capture device -- it just captures whatever you feed it. All analog tape capture projects require a line-level and a frame-level tbc. The first thing a viewer would say is that "no tbc" caused the problem, along with unstable playback. tbc's are designed to correct many instabilities in analog signals. Nothing else will do the trick. There is no software solution.

The forum has several guides for capture, editing, and restoral, and a ton of hardware recommendations. First, you need a better player. A built-in line tbc would be nice, but without that you could save a ton by getting a decent VCR and using an old used Panasonic ES10 or ES15 DVD recorder for both line- and frame-tbc pass-thru. The pass-thru would work even if the DVD-R's optical drive is dead, as long as the internal power and circuitry is OK. Beyond that, for a better picture and audio, it's another story entirely. But a better player and tbc hardware is where you should start.

Quote:
Originally Posted by darktree View Post
I have captured some old home movies to my hard drive, and now need to clean them up (hopefully with a filter or two in virtualdub or after fx)
AfterEffects is a marvelous tool, I use it often for color correction with ColorFinesse. But it's not not a good choice for video restoration. VirtualDub is a good start, and Avisynth is even better -- each can do things that the other can't.

Last edited by sanlyn; 08-24-2015 at 06:29 PM.
Reply With Quote
The following users thank sanlyn for this useful post: darktree (08-24-2015)
  #5  
08-24-2015, 06:33 PM
darktree darktree is offline
Free Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2015
Location: Kirkland, WA
Posts: 6
Thanked 1 Time in 1 Post
Quality is certainly not my goal, given the $20 combo player, $20 capture device + free included software, etc etc but ok. Just for fun, later when I get home I will try and upload a raw clip that is as unconverted as possible to see if there's anything more we can discern. These are my own videos, and not for someone else (so I'm not as concerned with how great it is... just want them to be digital so that they aren't COMPLETELY gone (original source material is pretty horrible as is, even in a perfect scenario).

While I do not want to get off topic, and maybe I will search the other threads before going further into this, I do have 100+ VHS tapes I may want to convert, so it might be worth my time and money to invest in a TBC. Any suggestions for a TBC for budding enthusiast like myself who wants a bit more control and quality over analog conversion of my old VHS (and some Hi8s) ? I looked on Amazon but the reviews are not super helpful.
Reply With Quote
  #6  
08-24-2015, 10:15 PM
sanlyn sanlyn is offline
Premium Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: N. Carolina and NY, USA
Posts: 3,648
Thanked 1,307 Times in 982 Posts
Okay, here's the long answer (there are short ones, but if you don't know a tbc from a toaster, the short answers don't make much sense):

There are two types of tbc, or Time Base Corrector. A line-level or line tbc corrects timing errors among the scanlines inside video frames. Some lines arrive earlier or later than others as the fields and frames stream from the player. The more unstable the player or the worse the tape, the bigger these line timing errors will be. Line errors appear as wiggles, notches and warps in vertical and angular lines, and as ripples in side borders, frame jitter, and oddball object motion or twitter against static backgrounds.

Take a look at your test.avi sample in post #1. Forget about the frame hops and look at the side borders. Those ripples, wiggles, and jittery notches in your side borders are the result of line timing errors, and not just the result of frame hopping. A line tbc together with a frame tbc (see next) can avoid some pretty bad cases of jitter and line distortion.

The second type of tbc is a framer-level or frame tbc. This tbc type corrects frame-to-frame timing errors by rebuilding the timing signals and helping to ensure consistent frame rate and audio rate. Their purpose is to prevent some forms of frame jitter, atop dropped and inserted duplicate frames, and help ensure audio sync

Line tbc's don't correct frame sync errors. Frame tbc's don't correct line sync errors. Each is designed for a specific job. There are many frame tbc's out there for $200 to $500, some for four figures, others for more. There are some cheapies out there for under $100 (usually called "video stabilizers". They're not called tbc's, because they aren't tbc's). The cheapies don't explain what kind of "stabilization" they perform: are they line tbc's? Frame tbc's? Both? The cheapies are usually frame-level with no line-level correction and so little correcting power that most are useless. Better tbc's have good resolving power and corrective circuitry to prveent damage to the incoming image. No tbc is perfect. Some slightly soften the image when removing signal noise, some slightly brighten the image -- but cheapies just make a mess of it, if they do anything at all.

Line-level tbc's at retail are almost non-existent, except for studio units that few of us can afford or know how to use. So where do you get these fabulous line tbc's? Many High-end vcr's have them built-in. These are usually the most effective line tbc's, but not always. A few old high-enders do have line tbc's but not very punchy ones. The Panasonic AG-1980 is the prosumer champ for line tbc power and steady playback -- that is, when the thing works. High-end JVC's of the late 1990's come in a close second, although they don't handle slow-play tapes well at all. Finding one that hasn't been ruin into the ground is a real crap shoot. You can get rebuilds of famous tbc-VCR's by Panasonic and JVC at pro shops that specialize in rebuilds, like TGrantPhoto. But these are rebuilds of VCRs that cost many more pineapples than your combo did, so don't think you can get away for under $275 or so, and probably more. At least you get a guarantee. If you buy on eBay or other auction site, what you get is what you get.

There are a whole bunch of good non-tbc Panasonic, Toshiba, etc., VCR's from the mid to late 1990's that are still in good shape. I own a couple of them, circa 1995-96, from eBay sellers who specialize in rebuilding legacy consumer-grade electronics and don't sell dinnerware or used trailer hitches on the side. These old workhorses come in pretty handy when my high-end job is unable to make nice with an old tape (yes, that does happen, even with the best of them). These are non-tbc but good-tracking vcr's from the Golden Era that sold for $350 to $500 back then and were built like tanks. Except for a few premium buys from $500 to $1500, if it's anything after 1996 forget it. By 2000, tin-and-plastic consumer VCR's might have been decent canoe anchors if they had been heavy enough, but they didn't even make good bookends.

One way that mere mortals work around all this trouble and expense, besides at least finding a decent VCR to begin with, is to use a few legacy DVD recorders as line tbc and frame sync pass-thru. No, you can not use any old DVD machine, and no they aren't as powerful as the best separate tbc's. But they're pretty good, better than the $50 ripoffs at Amazon, and they sure beat nothing. I use a couple of these pass-thru's myself from Panasonic and Toshiba. They're on eBay for $50 or so in merely fair shape, and about $100 from sellers who refurbish them. You can get a tummy full of info about pass-thru units (and more charts, graphs, and demos than you can digest in a weekend) and what works and what doesn't, at this thread: http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/3...hat-do-you-use.

Last edited by sanlyn; 08-24-2015 at 10:29 PM.
Reply With Quote
The following users thank sanlyn for this useful post: darktree (08-24-2015)
  #7  
08-24-2015, 10:27 PM
darktree darktree is offline
Free Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2015
Location: Kirkland, WA
Posts: 6
Thanked 1 Time in 1 Post
Wow thanks sanlyn! That was very good information for the newbular like myself!

Here is a 3 second uncompressed sample (122MB): darktreemedia.com/files/vhs/sample_uncompressed.avi



Which type of tbc would fix this? The line tbc or a frame tbc? Neither?

For this specific issue, I'm just concerned about the vertical popping that happens in ONE of the fields about 2 times a second. The rest of it (the squiggly lines on the side, et al) may very well be artifacting from the original press onto the VHS, as I do not know who mastered the 8mm slides into the video to begin with.

Last edited by darktree; 08-24-2015 at 10:38 PM. Reason: clarification
Reply With Quote
  #8  
08-25-2015, 07:47 AM
sanlyn sanlyn is offline
Premium Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: N. Carolina and NY, USA
Posts: 3,648
Thanked 1,307 Times in 982 Posts
True, the squiggles are production errors beyond your control. But those aren't the only problems with poor line sync. They can be smaller and numerous, which gets encoded as noise, split-hair lines, poor definition, and aliasing.

Your sample might be uncompressed as posted but it was lossy compressed in the past, and more than once. Did you notice that the vertical hops are all even-numbered fields? The problem starts with the way the tape is being tracked. Tbc's alone would be only half the solution.

During capture your setup inserted duplicate frames. That happens while capture gear is waiting for data to "arrive" from the player on time. After a time, one or more late fields or frames are ignored (dropped) to accept new data. Your uncompressed sample has dupes inserted in frames 11-12-13 and 28-29-30, 31-32-33, 49-50-51, then a dropped frame. Frames 63-64-65 are duplicates, as are 76-77-78. Then dupes in 80-81, then in 99-100-101-102-103-104-105, then multiple dropped frames.

The attached uncomp_Q2.mpg shows how your video would play if the hopping fields are replaced by new fields motion interpolated from previous and next good fields. There's also some cleanup of sloppy interlace combing that leaves interlacing intact -- such as it is, with what's left. So you have more than vertical jitter, you have stutter, freeze, and lurch. These are sure signs of misalignment + tracking failure + no tbc. The attached mpg was cropped, the image was centered in the frame, and encoded as 704x480, which gets you closer to true 4:3 display. 720x480 at 4:3 almost always looks slightly stretched. 704X480 for 4:3 video is valid for DVD and standard definition BluRay. For 16:9 you need 720x480.

First, you need a VCR with decent tracking, then the tbc's. Adding a tbc alone will help somewhat but not very much; a tbc needs data to work with from your vcr. As you can see, poor quality aside, even with bad fields replaced you still aren't getting very much. Especially with bad old tapes, you need a good vcr and both types of tbc.


Attached Files
File Type: mpg uncomp_Q2.mpg (2.59 MB, 29 downloads)
Reply With Quote
The following users thank sanlyn for this useful post: darktree (08-25-2015)
  #9  
08-25-2015, 09:47 AM
darktree darktree is offline
Free Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2015
Location: Kirkland, WA
Posts: 6
Thanked 1 Time in 1 Post
thanks again for the information and demonstration! I'll look into your suggestions and maybe save up for some decent equipment. What software do you recommend for compressing and touching up your final videos? That short clip really turned out nice!
Reply With Quote
  #10  
08-25-2015, 10:53 AM
sanlyn sanlyn is offline
Premium Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: N. Carolina and NY, USA
Posts: 3,648
Thanked 1,307 Times in 982 Posts
Um, well...I'm one of those fanatics that does it the hard way, considering how godawful many of my old "memory" tapes are. The demo clip was made with Avisynth filters and functions, monitoring the output and saving with VirtualDub as lossless YV12 video. I encoded with TMPGEnc Mastering Works, but I use other encoders as well.

This forum and its capture guides got me started several years ago. Like many members here I'm using home-brew and restored old XP PC's for capture with ATI All In Wonder AGP cards, and a new Win7 for lots of restoration work. I capture to losslessly compressed YUY2 using the huffyuv compressor, and work with lossless video until I finally encode. I use only one lossy encode to final delivery formats, which for VHS means DVD or standard definition BluRay. I also work with HD cable recordings from a Hauppauge HD PVR and a home built basic HTPC. Fortunately the HD recordings don't need cleanup. They are edited (commercials and other detritus removed) using smart-rendering TMPGEnc Smart Renderer or VideoReDo-HD. Some of the HD is downsampled in Avisynth as lossless media and re-encoded for DVD or standard definition BluRay.

For VHS capture I use an ATI All In Wonder 7500 Radeon and an AIW 9600XT Radeon. Both are AGP capture cards. My capture software is VirtualDub, capping to losssless media. I've collected over the years several used and rebuilt VCR's from Panasonic and JVC. The JVC's are used and gone now, and a Panny or two bit the dust. I started with about 400 old VHS tapes. The VCR's that remain are a Panasonic SVHS PV-S4670 and a PV-S4672 circa 1996, plus a rebuilt Panasonic AG-1980, and a rebuilt PV-4566 circa 1995. My outboard frame tbc is an AVT-8710 bought in 2004. When tbc pass-thru is needed I use an old Panasonic ES10, an ES15, and sometimes a Toshiba RD-XS34, all bought as refurbs. My monitors are HP and LG 22.5" IPS monitors calibrated with XRite colorimeters and software, and my two TV's are also calibrated using same.

Using losssless media I denoise, repair, and color correct with Avisynth and VirtualDub. I also use AfterEffects for color work and as my only timeline and effects app, using losssless media for input and output. Avisynth has functions for color work that requires YUV media, VirtualDub has many RGB color controls including ColorMill, gradation curves, and various histograms, and AE has ColorFinesse. Sometimes I color correct with the excellent quickie image tools in TMPGEnc Mastering Works or TMPGEnc Plus 2.5, which are also my encoders along with HCenc. Each encoder has pros and cons for various types of content and output formats. Mastering Works uses x264 and MPEG encoders. After encoding I use two old and one new version of TMPGEnc Authoring Works, depending on the PC I'm authoring with, and whether I'm authoring DVD, DVD dual layer, or BluRay/AVCHD. I also use the free TX264, which uses the x264 encoder. Most of the HD videos are either on disc or on external USB hard drives.

My DVD players are legacy Toshiba and DENON players from 2003-2008, and an OPPO BluRay. I burn videos to Verbatim AZO DVD and Panasonic or Verbatim BluRay discs. To date, thanks to my PC's and my two DVD recorders and HD PVR, I have about 3000 movies to keep me and the mrs company in our old age when the cable bills get too high, LOL! In fact at this very moment my RD-XS34 is recording 6 new TCM classics through our old standard definition cable box.

That's the hard way. Sane people would use an NLE like Premiere or SONY Movie Studio, but I find them too limiting. I once used Cyberlink software (came free with an old PC). I learned enough from that experience to stay away from Cyberlink. You can use whatever you want but most NLE's including some pricey big names have so-so encoders and are not much use for heavy-duty restoration work. They're designed for color correction, special effects, compositing, timeline, etc., but not for repair.
Reply With Quote
The following users thank sanlyn for this useful post: darktree (08-26-2015)
  #11  
08-26-2015, 12:40 PM
darktree darktree is offline
Free Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2015
Location: Kirkland, WA
Posts: 6
Thanked 1 Time in 1 Post
This is awesome info. I used to have an AGP Pinnacle capture card back in the early 2000s, now all I have left is the big blue dongle! Why did I ever get rid of that!

Thanks again for the great read. I'll be bookmarking this and referring to it for the next year while adventuring in VHS restoration!
Reply With Quote
  #12  
08-26-2015, 04:15 PM
sanlyn sanlyn is offline
Premium Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: N. Carolina and NY, USA
Posts: 3,648
Thanked 1,307 Times in 982 Posts
Quote:
Originally Posted by darktree View Post
I used to have an AGP Pinnacle capture card back in the early 2000s, now all I have left is the big blue dongle! Why did I ever get rid of that!
LOL! Be glad it's gone. It was pretty awful, and I've been the Pinnacle route myself. You can do better with a newer USB from ATI or Diamond Multimedia, or the old Diamond VC500.
Reply With Quote
The following users thank sanlyn for this useful post: darktree (08-26-2015)
  #13  
08-26-2015, 08:28 PM
jmac698 jmac698 is offline
Free Member
 
Join Date: Dec 2010
Posts: 387
Thanked 73 Times in 56 Posts
Hey Darktree,

It turns out I was working on a project with comets and duped/dropped frames, but I lost the material I was testing on and need something new. I'm dying to finish my script. I was wondering if you could provide 3 captures of the same section of VHS for me? I'm looking for your worst tape, especially if you have one with comets. What are comets? They are short white lines that appear randomly across the screen. The samples can be just a few seconds, with a combination of relative stillness (talking heads) and motion (like panning). Thx.
Reply With Quote
  #14  
08-26-2015, 09:06 PM
lordsmurf's Avatar
lordsmurf lordsmurf is offline
Site Staff | Video
 
Join Date: Dec 2002
Posts: 13,503
Thanked 2,449 Times in 2,081 Posts
"comets" = magnetic dropouts. And I have several of those, if you want. one have dropped frames, as I used a TBC.
Want some of mine?

- Did my advice help you? Then become a Premium Member and support this site.
- For sale in the marketplace: TBCs, workflows, capture cards, VCRs
Reply With Quote
Reply




Tags
analog, capture, jitter, vertical, vhs

Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
Defective AVT-8710 TBC only defective due to vertical jitter? premiumcapture Capture, Record, Transfer 1 08-19-2015 02:50 AM
My guide on removing vertical jitter using VirtualDub and Photoshop hysteriah Restore, Filter, Improve Quality 6 06-08-2015 04:45 AM
Random vertical jitter on JVC HR-S9600 VCR? premiumcapture Video Hardware Repair 6 04-20-2015 12:03 AM
Remove vertical jitter from interlaced footage? hysteriah Restore, Filter, Improve Quality 13 02-17-2015 09:43 AM
Capture card causing jitter and shifting? sanCapture Capture, Record, Transfer 3 03-02-2014 01:57 PM

Thread Tools



 
All times are GMT -5. The time now is 04:46 PM