VHS capture, Ut, Premiere, NeatVideo, RGB or YUV?
 

Hi,

my plan for archiving vhs tapes (and VOBs) of some old theater recordings was to capture
VHS with UTvideo 4:2:2: ULY2 lossless YUV - Avisynth (deinterlace, crop, mask), -
-Premiere pro (few titles, color correction, noise reduction Neat Video)-
-from Premiere Pro 1 copy in big quality for future needs (ULY2 again or different because of Neatvideo RGB??)
- 1 final H264 version for general purpose (TVs, projectors, internet)

With a hope that all above is acceptable and in a right order, I am wondering where to go after Neatvideo if I change to RGB from YUV with it.. I would like to have one lossless copy and compressed h264. Also, it looks like that size doubles when saving edited ULY2 in Premiere pro to ULY2 again.:eek:

For VOBs I didnt like Premiere pro behavior with MPG2 so I sent MPG2 to ULY0 4:2:0..At least it runs smoothly now in Premiere pro but I need your opinion on that too.. :hmm:

Thank you all
Svrle

*(didnt know how to edit mistake so I wrote it again :-)

Welcome. :)

Why Ut Video? It really never took off, and has fallen out of favor. It has zero longevity for the long term, and will likely disappear from the interwebs eventually, as so many other codecs have in the past 30 years.

For true archives, I would only use Huffyuv, Lagarith as 2nd choice. The Huffyuv user base is large, and the codec has been continuously "kicked the can" by indy devs to work on new WinOS (even a few Mac and Linux at times), even though the codec itself hasn't been updated in 20 years (ain't broke, don't fix it).

Ut Video has some BS in Wikipedia about being "better compression" (Lagarith is better), but it mostly achieves that by high resource use, resulting in dropped frames. So for capturing, it's a no-go.

Explain.

VOB are "Video OBject" files from DVD-Video discs, and contain already-digital video. Note that VOB is not MPEG, it contains MPEG. You must properly extract the MPEG video, and audio, from the VOB. It has extra "stuff" that makes it not a video file, breaks editing and playback.

Good. :congrats:

However, you're overlooking the most important aspect: the hardware.
- What VCR are you using?
- TBC?
- Capture card?

Those matter. You can make bad quality lossless video, because the incoming video was bad quality. Bad VCR, no TBC, lousy capture card.

Leave the master capture as native interlaced. You can deinterlace/crop/mask/etc a copy.

If you can use Avisynth, don't bother with Neat Video. Avisynth is a scalpel, NV is a rusty butter knife. It has gotten better over the years, but it's still behond the curve. It's mostly appealing to users that insists on a fancy whizbang GUI.

YUV, never RGB.

That's because it's confused. You didn't give it MPEG files. You gave a file that contains MPEG. It must be properly extracted before import. Do you still have the DVDs?

Thank you LordSmurf, it is nice to have you "in person" here :congrats:

They all came to my picture at once, prior my project that I explained a bit here : https://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vid...lurriness.html
so I had to decide what is promising and newish to be reliable in a future..Even though i captured cca 30 VHS tapes with utvideo i dont mind recapture it with Huffyuv if the second is better.


My project is to archive and correct old theater shows. They came on VHS and DVDs, some of them on both. DVDs were ripped and sent to me in folders with VOBs in it. So first I used DVDVob2Mpg to combine them together into one MPG2. I noticed that some of them are having sync problems. After lots of reading I manage to sort that out with changing 25 frames PAL VBR to CBR but I achieved that while encoding to Utvideo codec. Premiere pro was acting a bit stiff with a MPG2 video, not going always smoothly through the frames. Because I have 30VHS tapes as well to work on, I thought that I can work on similar codec for DVDs (MPG) as well. Maybe I can do H264 placebo (kind of lossless) format to work on MPG2 cos my final format will be H264?

VCR- JVC HR-S9850
TBC- built in JVC
Capture card - IO data GVusb2

My knowledge of Avisynth+ is so modest and my eye is not used to all sorts of problems in VHS and they possible filter remedy. I admit that I was hoping to do most of the noise work in neatvideo, now you are challenged me:wink2: If I do use NV, Ishould go back to YUV with lossless? I am coming from music field, it is interesting to learn but last two months I am reading and reading and testing..

I do have VOBS separated and also combined to MPG2..I can also get the DVD-s, they are 400km away from me but no problem if I have to.

So, I will download Huffyuv and try it with VHS..But what to do with MPG2? That is 4:2:0 if I am right, for Avisynth and Premiere pro how to edit, as a MPG2 or something else? Virtualdub is not reading MPG2? :hmm:

Thank you very much!

MPG2 edit or encode lossless?
 

Most of my VHS are now in huffyuv codec as lordsmurf suggested above but still not sure what to do with MPG2 (exVOBs) and editing them.

To edit them in avisynth and premiere pro as MPG2 with Neatvideo as well OR to encode them to something lossless and uniformed as VHS, in case I have to combine them in a same project (Huffyuv (VHS) and MPG2 (DVD)).

Some of the MPG2 are having sync problem, VBR issue probably..If I encode them to something else and insist on CBR 25 (PAL) while encoding I can fix it but not if they stay in MPG2..

Any ideas? Thanks