I officially started the recapture process, Here is a small segment of the capture:
Thank you for your new sample.
Tree.avi is a little bright but the capture appears to be faithful to the source. Its worst enemy is spastic and camera motion and jiggle, which wreaks chaos with sharpness and smooth edges. Even when I deinterlaced with QTGMC, edges were ragged. This is mostly the fault of severe motion, not the player or cappture card -- the latter are doing the best they can with the source.
Color looks accurate but the black level and gamma look rather high. That's easy enough to fix in post-processing. Often it's difficult during capure to control levels with home video, they change so frequently. I made some simple corrections in Avisynth. Color is largely personal, of course. You can tweak however you wish.
Below, the original frame 152 (*borders removed for clarity*) resized to a 4:3 image. The original is a loittle pale and lacks a little of the perception of depth.
Below, frame 152 with levels and saturation adjusted:
Both frames are still interlaced, so they're a little fuzzy due to motion. I also noticed very noisy edges, especially in the right-side wall structures whose edges looked very ragged and kept moving in ways that made the edges "buzz".
The attached Tree.mp4 is encoded at 4:3. Some side border pixels were cropped off to get a 704x576 frame (Note that 704x576 is valid for 4:3 anamorphic DVD). There were 10 pixels of bottom-border head switching noise that I cropped off and replaced with 6 black pixels along the bottom and 4 along the top to maintain the original height. The original top border has a broken 2-pixels at the top, which were also replaced with solid lines. A thin uneven top border is common with many home camera transfers. I also made an identical MPEG for DVD, which I haven't posted.
Smoothing continuous camera jiggle take some work. It also requires higher encoded bitrates. The motion makes inherent VHS noise look worse, and when encoded much of the data bits are wasted on that noise.Calming some of the horizontal and vertical shake is often done to make the encoding look smoother and to help temporal denoisers that are based on motion. But all deshakers move the image around in such a way that some of the original pixels from all 4 sides will be cut off. I used VirtualDub's DeShake to relieve some of the jiggle. The settings were mild and came at a cost of about 15% of the original image. With less motion, the cost would hardly be noticeable. With bad motion and strong settings, the image would be very stable but much less of the original image would remain. Another cost with motion interpolation deshakers is a bit of contrast.
The DeShake example looks a little smoother, attached as Tree_Mild_DeShake.mp4 .
Wow the processed videos looked amazing, A little blurrier but definitely looked better than the original. And yes the cameraman is a rooky he shakes a lot and he most likely doesn't know what white balance is, There is a lot of scenes have bluish whites.
Is there a post processing easy to use software that doesn't use keyboard typing and scripts?
A little blurrier but definitely looked better than the original.
Noise and motion smoothers always take something away. But actually it's blurry even when deinterlaced because motion blur and aliasing in the camera don't have clean edges. I guess one could say it's not the detail that's sharp, it's the noise. It's possible to sharpen a bit more but only after defects are cleared, or you'd have a very sharp disaster.
Quote:
Originally Posted by latreche34
yes the cameraman is a rooky he shakes a lot and he most likely doesn't know what white balance is, There is a lot of scenes have bluish whites.
Jiggly cameras, not unusual. We see them all the time. A recent post had camera motion so bad, denoisers became confused and just created artifacts -- and the noise was still there!
Color imbalance is common, even with retail tape. Most people would fix too much blue by adding red, which wouldn't be correct. You'd end up with an imbalance of pink (blue + red = pink). You would either reduce blue or reduce blue contrast, or add yellow (red + green).
Quote:
Originally Posted by latreche34
Is there a post processing easy to use software that doesn't use keyboard typing and scripts?
Umm, I'm afraid there's no Avisynth equivalent except with big studio gear, although pros do use Avisynth as well. A favorite with us amateurs, too. No M.I.T. degree required, but you do have to learn up on a few tricks. Studio gear is automated to a degree, but instead of scripting you need to know programming -- a bit more difficult. There's a graphical interface for Avisynth (AvsPmod) but, really, I can't stand it. Filter setup is a pain, often doesn't work correctly, and the filters and AvsPmod keep getting updates. And you have to write a script anyway. AvsPmod can't run without a script.
Like many people I don't re-type entire scripts from scratch. Text files full of boilerplate text are kept around. Just copy and paste, and make a few changes if needed.
The scripts can be very basic or very complex. Avisynth exists on many levels. I should add that I also used VirtualDub, especially for the DeShake version.
Avisynth is easier than first appears. Most of us mere mortals learned by example. And don't forget the Getting Started pages in its Help files. The app and most of its popular filters have lots of documentation -- maybe too much, for some of us. Most people tend to use the same batch of filters over and over. Gets rather routine after a while.
I use VirtualDub as often as Avisynth. There are things you can do in VDub that you can't do in Avisynth, and vice versa. We can get into details later. Meanwhile the sample capture doesn't seem to have defects from the player or capture card, given that VHS and webcams/cameras are what they are.
[EDIT] Oops, forgot. The original sample has a greenish stain along the right border. There's a filter for that. Works most of the time and worked OK here (some videos are just impossible, though). You'd need Avisynth for that filter. The filter's name is chubbyrain2. I have no idea how the maker came up with that one.
I will get into avisynth later on after I'm done with the capturing, I have to learn it since I need it. Is there an option to change individual colors in VirtualDub?
I didn't change any hues in the sample I posted. I lowered black levels and gamma, and pushed saturation up a tiny notch. When gamma and black levels are too high it can often make color look washed out.
I could disagree
BTW, some of that motion distortion is obviously due to camera blur
Also remember that some broadcasting engineers are untrained monkeys with sticks.
Quote:
Originally Posted by sanlyn
The video responded to telecine removal with inaccuracies such as color corruption and severe multi-frame chroma ghosting at scene changes. It shows signs of being "played" with telecine removal and then poorly re-interlaced
It took several years for me to understand IVTC, because most of my homemade cartoon sources would not cleanly convert. Chroma ghosting was always an issue. This was 10+ years ago, when I was into the "music video" scene (anime, cartoons mostly), and into creating advanced motion menus for fanmade DVDs. Trying to IVTC those for processing in Premiere was not cooperating. Back then, the best deinterlace methods involved nnedi, pre-QTGMC. (I actually still have the sources for my favorite music vid, and plan to redo it at some point.)
So again, sometimes the source suck before we ever get them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by sanlyn
Thanks for the samples, but you might not get much feedback from those who won't download
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Quote:
Originally Posted by sanlyn
Color is largely personal, of course. .
Below, frame 152 with levels and saturation adjusted:
You overdid it. Too much green/yellow. Coincidentally, while watching baseball yesterday, I was reading a magazine about editing, and how too many people, even pros, have gotten into a bad habit of overdoing color in the digital age. It's something I heavily agree with.
____
It's funny how this was latreche34's thread, but I've only replied to you sanlyn.
I was playing with the Pinnacle 500-USB firewire port to see if I can use it in the future if I ever get a laptop without firewire and I find out that the device acts like a bridge between the computer's USB port and its firewire port, I was able to hookup a DV/HDV deck and was able to test view/capture a tape using several DV and HDV capture software, Not only that but I was able to control the deck from the software like play/stop/ffwd etc all from the USB port.
I was playing with the Pinnacle 500-USB firewire port to see if I can use it in the future if I ever get a laptop without firewire and I find out that the device acts like a bridge between the computer's USB port and its firewire port, I was able to hookup a DV/HDV deck and was able to test view/capture a tape using several DV and HDV capture software, Not only that but I was able to control the deck from the software like play/stop/ffwd etc all from the USB port.
That's surprising, and could be useful for many people. The only other device known to do this is the Dazzle Hollywood DV Bridge.
So you could capture a DV cassette over USB without additional compression?
Quote:
Originally Posted by latreche34
Here is some pics showing the guts of the Pinnacle 500-USB if anyone interested:
The ADC is the SAA7113H, which was a widely-used chip in the early 2000s.
That's surprising, and could be useful for many people. The only other device known to do this is the Dazzle Hollywood DV Bridge.
So you could capture a DV cassette over USB without additional compression?
HDV and DV with no additional compression, It just converts Firewire to USB with no external power needed as it draws its power from the USB port, Pretty amazing I almost bought the Pinnacle Moviebox for that purpose which is bulky and requires external power until I tested the 500 and found to be working, Pinnacle never advertised this feature.
