Hi8 capture project with Sony DCR-TRV230?
 

I just received my Sony DCR-TRV230 from good 'ol eBay today. I am happy to report the camera is in really great shape. Cosmetically it looks almost new, and I did a test capture via FireWire today with a full digital8 format tape (a little over an hour long) and everything seems good. The cassette mechanism is still solid; nice and smooth open/closing with no odd sticking issues. No tape jams after trying 3 or 4 tapes out. :congrats:

I have a couple Digital8 tapes I am working with for capture this weekend, along with a few regular Hi8 tapes. The DCR-TRV230 has fire wire capture of course, and the software I used to cap the test was ScenalyzerLive. If anyone has a better suggestion, please let me know - but I have read the comment 'DV is DV no matter what software you use - it stays the same dtatarate, ect'. I like the fact that ScenalyzerLive will name the files based on the date stamped in the time code, as I sort all my home movie media on my pc by date.

So, that leads me to my targeted media with these tapes. DVD is one, and my digital archive is the other. I have a large NAS storage unit where all my home videos and media is stored, all sorted by folders/date. I try to keep those files in high quality so I can pull from them later for DVD copies for family or to add to youtube. A lot of my video files these days come from digital tape-less cameras of course, so those are pretty easy to keep sorted and stored - drag and drop the files where I want them. These tape sources, of course not so much.

I have read threads here about targeted media, and I see lossless AVI is best for capture, Mpeg2 best for DVD/Archiving, and H.264 (I think?) for online sites like youtube, is this correct?

Are there any recommendations for my upcoming captures? Should I do firewire capture for the Digital8 and anlog for the regular with Virtualdub? Or just use Firewire for all of them? The camera does have an S-video out. The capture device I will have access to this weekend is the Happauge USB Live 2.

It's a shame you have to take a quality hit and add compression artifacts by encoding analog Hi8 to lossy DV before going to another lossy encoding stage for DVD. Yes, lossless is the highest quality for analog-to-digital capture, and there are several lossless codecs for realtime lossless compression to reduce the file size (huffyuv, Lagarith, UT Video). Lossless is the ultimate capture archive for analog sources. From lossless one can easily go to any of dozens of final output or web formats. Meanwhile DV-to-DV is always copied, not captured or re-recorded, via Firewire, to avoid first-stage loss. I don't know why anyone would want to degrade either Hi8 or DV source by capturing directly to h.264, especially to large-GOP sources that seriously cripple future editing.

I will gladly capture the analog hi8 tapes to a lossless avid file for sure. No problems with doing that at all. I just have to trade up more on virtualdub to do it.

Is the Hauppauge USB live 2 a decent option for Windows 10 a decent option for capturing with Virtual dub? Is going to be the analog capture device I have access to for the weekend.

It takes longer to read up on it than to do it. There is an updated detailed guide: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...-settings.html. Includes notations on working with USB units.

Is the Hauppauge USB live 2 a decent option for Windows 10 a decent option for capturing with Virtual dub? Is going to be the analog capture device I have access to for the weekend.[/quote]The Hauppauge is one of the forum's recommended units optimized for digital source capture. The Diamond VC500, also popular, has been around for several years and is very similar.

Thanks for the reply! The link to the Virtualdub is what I've been looking into on and off.

I'm not to savy with color levels and what not yet. After the capture, what should I look to do next to touch the footage up?

The standard and preferred capture format for analog such as VHS or Hi8 is 720x480 interlaced lossless AVI files using a YUY2 color space. YUY2 more closely resembles (and preserves) the color system used by analog tape, which is not exactly the same color system used by DV. Most would use huffyuv for lossless compression, it's easiest on CPU's during capture.

What to do with the capture later? That depends on how it looks and what you intend for final output. You can cut a short few seconds of captured video and preserve its original colorspace and compression without alteration by making a short sample edit this way: open the file in Virtualdub and use the edit controls in the lower left corner of VDub's workspace (you can also use items in the top main menu). About 8 to 10 seconds of lossless huffyuv YUY2 video with motion would suffice and would fall under the 99mb upload limit. Save your selected edit by clicking "Video..." -> then select "Direct stream copy" in the drop down menu. Then save the new sample file.

Awesome! Thanks for the input. I should have the USB live 2 device tomorrow. I'll output the camera via S-Video into Virtualdub using the huffyuv option. I have read up on it, just have not done any capturing with it yet. I am going to capture the footage through firewire as well and do comparisons. I'm interested to see how much of a difference I personally can see,

D8 cameras from eBay tend to be better than not, because the owners rarely used them. I'm really not surprised,

My method is
- capture lossless
- if future editing/restoration needed, save lossless
- if not, fine as is, same as 422 MPEG-2 at 15+mbps (encoded with MainConcept)

Pretty much. The streaming copy is also deinter;aced copy.

I don't recall Avid having anything lossless for SD, and the best HD in lossy DNxHD (similar to ProRes422, almost lossless lossy).

It's fine.

^ This. :congrats:

Happy capturing. :cool:

I apologize. That was a type-o. Lossless AVI without the 'd' was what that should have said.

I am happy to report that I have the USB Live 2 installed, and it is successfully talking with Vdub for capturing.

I have been following the guide for the settings that sanlyn provided, and so far so good. I have run into a hiccup with the huffyuv compression. I can't seem to get it to show up in the options menu. I downloaded the rar files off the forum here. I wasn't sure which ones to go for, so I went for them all. I have the HuffYUV.rar and the 65.rar. I also downloaded the the HuffYUV-multithreaded.rar and the VirtualDub 1.9.11 + Filters.rar file.

I unRar the standard HuffYUV rar, and I see the .dll and the.inf files. I read up on the install thread for these, but I am apparently doing something wrong because in the compression section in Vdub, the HuffYUV isn't showing up as an option.

I followed the instructions and right clicked on the .inf file and cliked 'install' and it asked me for admin rights, I accepted, and then it appeared to install, but the option isn't listed in Vdub. I restarted Vdub twice, and even selected 'Show all codecs, even if they may not work' and it is not listed there. I tried both the regular Huffyuv and the 64bit. Do I need to extract them to a certain folder first?

Which instructions?
Did you see this: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...html#post11627
If not, that's your issue.

I did not see this, thanks.

I did try it, but no luck. I am confused, because I did not get en error message, and it appeared to install fine. But it is still not showing up in the compression section in Vdub under the video tab. I even re-tried it with the 64bit one, and a after running the command listed on the thread you showed me, it box popped up and said 'A version of this is already installled, do you want to over right it?"

So, it apparently installed, but Vdub isn't seeing it still. Do I need to reboot my entire system after the install? Or just Vdub?

-- merged --

Scratch that. ha. I got it! Thanks!

I can't seem to get video to playback however after the catpure. I get the audio, but no video. I tried Windows media player (The Windows 10 built in one) and VLC, whcih tells me it doesn't have the Huff codec?

-- merged --

Okay, so I ran into a couple more bumps. The huffYUV compression issue I edited in above (wasn't sure if you saw that or not).

I was only getting Black and White from the S-Video cable, but there was a bent pin in the cable. That's fixed.

Now, this next issue I remember I had with my Canon HV30 as well, but there is an option to change settings for it. On the TRV230, the way you transfer video/audio is of course with S-Video or composite cables. The supplied composite cable has the standard red, yellow, white cables on one end, then a 3.5mm plug on the other that transfers all 3 signals from the audio/video jack on the camera. I am using that cable to transfer the audio, and the S-Video cable of course for the video.

The audio has a terrible buzz in it. Like, overly dramatic buzz. On the HV30, there is a settings in the playback menu to chage the a/v output jack to A/V both or just audio. I remember wearing a pair of headphones one time trying to watch a tape playback on it, and this simular buzz was there, and switching the option to just audio got rid of the buzz.

I am assuming this is the same sort of issue. After hearing this horrific buzz in the test capture I did, I tried a pair of headphones. Buzz is there, and super loud. The issue is, I can not for the life of me see where in the options I can switch the a/v output jack to JUST audio. Am i missing something? Or am I on the right path and just have to find the option in the menus....


**UPDATE** you can delete this. I am a moron. There is a headphone jack on the other side of the camera.

That's odd, I'm playing huffyuv files all day long with the latest 32-bit VLC player in Win7. It doesn't matter if you have other codecs installed, VLC uses its own and ignores external codecs.

Windows Media Player for W10 is a total loss anyway, just forget it's there. There are better media players, even in older 32-buit versions:
- The old standby Media Player Classic (MPC) https://www.videohelp.com/download/m...c_20100214.zip
- A newer 32-bit Media Player Classic BE (MPC-BE) https://www.videohelp.com/download/M...-installer.zip
- An even newer 32-bit Media Classic Home Cinema (MPC-HC) https://www.videohelp.com/download/M...1.7.13.x86.exe

As for VLC, I still have this guy but every new version has a different problem that previous versions didn't have, and they keep changing their internal codec lineup.

Yea, I don't use the standard Windows 10 player at all anyways, but I tried it just to see what it would do.

I tried a capture with the standard AVI uncompressed option that's at the top of the list - YIKES. Holy file size. 20 minute video was over 18 gigs. Can't be doing that for my archive files ha. Temporary projects, sure. But that's about it.

I'll try and switch back to the huffyuv and see what happens with the playback. If one of these other media players you suggested plays them fine, I'll be sure to use it as my standard player for these captures. I want to be able to capture in AVI format for sure and keep them in my archive. That way if I need to post them to youtube or make a family member a DVD of a certain video, I can do so from the AVI file like you mentioned before.

I have my first tape captured. I did a comparison between the AVI analog and the Firewire DV by matching the clips up in Vegas Pro 14 and muting the top video on and off. I can see what you mean for sure with the DV caps. The colors are not as rich, and the cropping feature for the analog cap really helped fill the frame properly. So thanks for pointing me into the S-Video direction.

Thanks for all the tips. This is getting interesting, but in a fun way :)

-- merged --

So this is a sample of what I got from the capture so far. Hopefully i did this right. I went in, selected a few seconds of video, and under the video tab I selected 'direct stream copy' and then under file I saved it as avi.

I didn't do much with the capture itself as far as settings in contrast and what not. Wasn't really sure what would be the best settings. I did go in and crop it a bit to get rid of the black portions around the edges.

I also attached two screen shots. One is the analog capture, the other the firewire cap.What a difference.....

The analog capture should look anywhere near that smeary.

That's what I kinda felt too. But I'm not sure what's causing it?

Likely the capture card. Maybe...

Capture some VHS to lossless AVI. Let's compare.

Be very sure to take screenshots with VirtualDub, not something else. Other stuff messes with the image quality. VirtualDub is precise, unmolested screenshot of video frame.

Thanks for the sample. Not bad for a first try with VDub.

Nope, that's not what the crop feature is designed for primarily, and you don't want to modify the source image to that extent. The crop function temporarily eliminates black borders and other disturbances such as bottom-border head switching noise, because they adversely affect the levels histogram. You're supposed to disable cropping before starting the capture.

That's correct.

A sample histogram is shown in the settings guide linked earlier. As it is, you protected highlights okay, but darks are crushed. The image below shows a histogram with with dark levels in the non-safe area of the graph (white bar at top of the histogram). The non-safe side borders of the levels histograms indicate when the input signal encroaches into unsafe levels. In this case you end up with murky darks and very little dark shadow detail because of clipping.

http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...1&d=1518319320

Ouch!! Don't do that the way you did it here. It's not the way borders are adjusted. As it is, you cropped illegally using odd vertical scanline numbers and screwed up the chroma. You have to ask yourself what you're going to do with a height of 471 pixels, which isn't valid for any standard format. It results in fatal errors from many filters, is a problem for many media players, and will be rejected by most encoders.

In order to work with the sample I had to replace the original vertical borders in Avisynth to get a height of 480 pixels, at the same time centering the image vertically. The 704-pixel width works OK for standard def DVD, but for a 16:9 image you'll need 720 width. There are a bizzilion examples of cropping and restoring original frame dimensions with Avisynth and VirtualDub. Avoid the newbie mistake of cropping borders and then resizing the image to fill the frame -- it distorts and degrades the image. The attached mp4 was deinterlaced with QTGMC and encoded for 480p web posting at 59.94 fps. The sample's lighting looked a little dim so I increased gamma a bit in Avisynth.

Illegal cropping dimension is probably the culprit, along with YUV processing in Vegas. Colors look a little corrupt, especially red, and there's a sepia color cast over the image.

And why is this video's field order bottom field first instead of TFF?

Yep, I missed that. :smack:

Sorry for the delayed replied to these.... my eyeballs were fried and I needed to take a step back from this. I was at it for over 6 hours straight.

I can capture some VHS today and post it. I won't get my Panasonic AG-1980 until later this week, but I have the good 'ol Emerson I can pass through the ES15 for now just to see what happens.

How do you screen shot in Vdub? I can't seem to find it. And I am assuming the capture card isn't the issue now? I just botched the capture?

Thanks for the encouraging words. This is legit my first time trying this. Have not done much with analog since Pinnacle Studio back in 2007-ish.

This is where I got confused after reading other threads you and lordsmurf where posting in (I really do try to read about things before I ask questions :laugh:.) For whatever reason, the Crop section remained check marked after I took the black boarder out. Was I suppose to reset all the crop values to 0? What threw me off was, the cropping went away in the preview/overlay window while it was capturing, but it apparently kept the settings in tact. I remember reading posts where you said to turn it off before capturing, which I thought I had done. Guess not?

First off, wow.... that fixed clip you posted looks awesome compared to the first. THAT'S the kind of result I want to know how to achieve. And I am sure there where other things that could be done to it to make it even better....

Histogram is kinda like EQ for video in a way? I some what now how to read one, but never really know how what to ajust. Is it suppose to be pretty even all the way across?

When I started setting up Vdub with my VCR via composite cables to get the settings started, I was able to see the histogram fine. Once I switch to the Hi8 cam-corder with an S-Video cable, what I would see is a blank bar like what what you see in the image I have attached. to this reply. Is there a setting I missed somewhere?

Thanks for the info on this. As I mentioned earlier, the cropping this was a mis-understanding mostly, and I thought I had turned it off. I am assuming you have to actually reset the all vaules to 0 in it when you are done using it to look at the histogram.

Are you referring to just the still images I posted? The video clip I uploaded never touched vegas. That one came right from Vdub. The stills I captured in Vegas.

I honestly am not sure. Like I said, all I really did aside from the cropping is simply capture it using the Vdub guide you posted. Should all analog caps be top field first? If not, how do you know what the feild order should be? And how do you change it in Vdub?

@Lordsmurf: When you say smeary, are you referring to the black interlaced lines around the colors? Or something else? I noticed that the digital cap, even though the colors were weaker, had a more clear signal.

Sorry, I am all new to this! Just trying to put the pieces together! As far as AVIsynth goes, I have it, but not a clue how to use it. I don't want to get to ahead of myself here though, so I wanna figure out what needs addressed in the cap process first.

I do appreciate all the help though! I feel like I on the right track...?

Dion't wsorry about it. We don't like to push and shove around here. We get tired too.

Top menu, "Video..."-> then "Copy source frame to clipboard." If you want to see the effects of any VDub filters applied, "Copy output frame to clipboard". We would prefer the unaltered source frame for the forum.

LOL, it's a long way from botched. Stick around, you'll see some really awful captures.

That's a complaint of mine as well. Yes, you have to set crop params back to zero. Pain in the neck, yes, I agree. And I've forgotten to it, too !

Histograms and similar graphs aren't EQ. They do do anything, they just show information. They do help you analyze trouble spots and they chnage accordingly when you make corrections. It's difficult to eyeball many visual problems correctly, even though your brain is saying "something is wrong here, but what?". There are many types of graphs, including those based on YUV like the one I used and those based in RGB, such as the ColorTools plugin for VirtualDub. There are also waveforms and vectorscopes, which present the same information in different ways.

Not every scene will fill a histogram edge to edge. A night scene and most interiors won't get bright enough -- although you can have specular highlights such as a light or lamp in the frame that's brighter than other objects. During playback the levels will vary (they change a few times slightly but visibly in your sample when darker and lighter objects enter the frame). Usually a minute or two of play will allow you to set a safe range for varying levels. Aim for the worst-case scenario -- you can always adjust after capture. Retail tape editions are more well-behaved, but not always.

Changing the player or the source might require at least minor changes in your levels setup, but sometimes not. Why the histogram disappeared is a mystery to me, but I see you're using VDub v.10.x. I never noticed any problem with v.9.x, but I never changed input cables while setting up levels. Maybe it requires restarting VDub.

There's a good free histogram and levels tutorial at Cambridge Photo. It's for still cameras, but the principles for video are exactly the same. The article uses parade-style histograms like those in Photoshop, Premiere, Vegas and VDub's ColorTools.
Understanding histograms Part 1 and Part 2
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tut...istograms1.htm
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tut...istograms2.htm

The sepia color cast is in the video. But all analog and consumer DV videos have some kind of color cast, usually from the camera, and red is usually pushed harder than the other colors (because it makes video samples look "good" in neon-lighted showrooms). Often the color cast is cyan or yellow-green. This applies to analog tape as well as DV, the latter of which likes to push bright levels past legal limits to impress those who don't know better. Some VCR brands will push contrast to ridiculous levels. They're all capture headaches, which is why better cap software has level controls.

Both images and the video alike have bright edge sharpening halos that are apparently in the original recording. I used a good Avisynth filter plugin for that (DeHalo_ALpha) and the aWarpSharp2 plugin to help reduce chroma bleed. There is also DCT ringing (edge ghosting) in the date-and-time chartacters in the lower right, for which AVisynth has some deringers -- unfortunately they soften some videos too much. These filters require deinterlaced video. In the case of the earlier mp4 I left the video progressive at 59.94 fps, although many websites would force you to drop alternate frames to maintain 29.97 fps. For DVD one would normally reinterlace in Avisynth, which does it cleanly and efficiently the way it's supposed to be done and which can do it changing field order to the usual TFF. But in this case a common problem of noisy interlace raised its ugly head (excessive combing effects). This is a fault of camera shutter design; some are worse at interlace than others. With an old CRT, it's not noticeable.

For today's TV's, one can discard alternate frames with a clean deinterlacer like QTGMC and make a valid standard def DVD or BluRay by lying to your encoder and telling it to encode with interlace flags (many set top players will play it as interlaced anyway!). The attached mpg was processed and encoded that way. This cuts temporal resoltiioon from the otiginal 59.94 fileds per secvond to 29.97 fields per second and results in less smooth motion, especially on camera pans. Sometim,es there's just a very subtle stutter (called judder, if you're really watching), more often on fast action there is a souble-image effect for a split second. And some say the result looks slightly less sharp than proper interlace. But many say it's less offensive than a camera's sloppy interlace noise. Try the mpg and see what you think.

Analog tape is usually TFF (Top Field First), DV is usually BFF (Bottom Field First). But there are exceptions. Why, I can't say. It's best to capture the field order as-is from the input signal. I guess you could change the field order in Virtualdub, but it's so much easier and faster in Avisynth where you can use the existing colorspace.

I'll await lordsmurf's advice here, but IMO the DV image is more fuzzy and has some compression losses that will show up as worse later when encoding to final formats. It's just possible that the SONY's playback of analog tape is a little smeary (I don't know if that's the best word), or it could be the original camera's fault. The effect is seen in the chroma, which can be sharpened in a number of ways using fast masking in Avisynth -- it's difficult in VirtualDub if not impossible.

There's also some chroma damage in the way the video was cropped using odd-numbered scanlines. Cropping is done in elements of 2, or even in elements of 4 with some formats, because of the way chroma data is stored in different color systems. Avisynth online help posts the table shown below as a guide to proper crop dimensions for different formats, color spaces, and frame structures:

http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...1&d=1518368486

Above chart from the Avisynth wiki page at http://avisynth.nl/index.php/Crop.

Thanks! I'll be sure to do so going forward!

I guess that makes me feel some what better ha.

I won't forget next time, especially if it can cause the issues that my first cap here has.


Thanks for the tips. I'll try and make adjustments better next capture. What about captures with a LOT of change in the lighting? For example, in a home movie I had issues with in the past when editing in Vegas, the shot moved from a poorly lit living room to a brightly lit kitchen 5 to 8 times in a span of 15 to 20 minuets. How much work does that generate?

I not only re-started Vdub several times, the screen shot I shared of the missing histogram came after a full Windows reboot. I did not try the VHS composite capture after the histogram vanished, but as I said, it was there in living color when I first started my set up with the VCR.

Thanks! I'll check them out for sure.


Thanks for the explanation. This cleared up a few things, but I also have never used AVIsynth, so some of it kinda goes over my head at the moment. When you say 'combing', I am assuming you are referring to those awful black lines that kind of look a batch of teeth on a straight hair comb? I kept seeing it in and it was driving me nuts.

I thought the mpeg you uploaded was awesome. As I stated in my last reply, I want to get to the point where I can achieve those results because I have learned what to look out for. I know it won't happen over night, but that is why I am hear. To learn as much as I can!

That is what I did. I just captured it as is. I did nothing with the field order on the capture itself. I knew DV was usually bottom field first, as I have done a lot of work in Vegas with DV where my renders turned out bad because I didn't have the field order set properly.

These are the things I still have to learn about. I some what understand the chroma topic, but not really. I have not really dove into the terminology with a lot of video work yet. Bare with me.... work in progress lol.

Thanks for the details. I am assuming these are the cropping guidelines to follow, but cropping isn't to be done unless needed AFTER the cap, correct?

Looking more into the histogram ordeal, and knowing more about audio then I do video, I stumbled onto this video on youtube wich really helped me understand a few things....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htqrTTSZp-M

Thanks a million for the reply! The more you info you feed me, the more I want to know things ha. I appreciate this VERY much!:congrats:

Amateurs are always making shots like that (my sister is a real camera kamikaze), and advanced users are always shaking their fists at the results. :P

Sometimes the exposure is such that the transition works anyway without special help, and viewers understand the change in lighting. Sometimes it's not so easy. In capturing, you soon find a way to find the worst case scenario and set up for it, then tweak later.

On rare occasions I use an Avisynth plugin called HDRagc, which does some exposure and backlight compensation. If you use it on full auto you can blow a picture apart. Instead, I tame things changing some of HDRagc's parameters (there are about a dozen of them, fully explained in the filter's download). Most auto filters are as bad as the agc in cameras and do exactly what you don't want at exactly the wrong time. Otherwise, it's not uncommo0n to chop a capture into many segments that are processed separately, then rejoined later.

A thread that will show you some Avisynth scripts with these special filters and the before/after home videos that made me desparate enough to use them is in this post: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...huffyuv-2.html. Exposure correction required work in the original YUV, while color correction and other filters were in RGB with Virtualdub. The earlier part of the same thread, FYI, has a lot of detail on Avisynth and VirtualDub filters in common use. Avisynth and VirtualDub are essential repair tools, each compliments the other. Avisynth seems scary until you realize that it's just a sequential series of commands run in Virtualdub using the same battery of filters over and over for almost everything. But it is somewhat strange to see a filter named "nnedi3_rpow2", which sounds petty cryptic until you learn that it's only a specially-honed filter to resize an image by 2X. Looks daunting but acts like a puppy in use.

You have me on that one. It could be just a quirk with VDub v.10x, which I don't use.

Yes, combing is the interlace "teeth" seen in editors that don't deinterlace, which includes most editors. When you work you want to see the video in its primal state so you'll know what's going on. Playback is different; when you see excessive combing or sawtooth edges in media players and TV it's usually the camera's fault, especially cameras designed during the CRT era.

It doesn't take as long as you'd think at first sight. Most advanced users learned this crazy stuff by watching what others did in forum posts, although the documentation that comes with some of the advanced filters is helpful (if you can slog your way thru the techy stuff) -- the latter can be slippery sometime, but at least you'll know how not to use a particular filter. One of the better filter guides is the online help for VirtualDub's gradatio0n curves filter, which mimics the functions of the curve filter from Photoshop, Premiere, Vegas, and other high-priced stuff (http://members.chello.at/nagiller/vd.../tutorial.html).

Correct. What you want is a capture of every part of the original, even the pesky borders, with original image content intact.

Nice find! Thanks for the link.

Image2.jpg = Assumed DV with analog tape source, obvious timing wiggles. ie, no TBCs.

Image3.jpg = Assumed to be analog capture via Hauppauge USB, smeary/blurry, at least partially due to deinterlace. If I'm reading correctly, also due to bad resizing, etc. You filtered at capture time, and should never do that.

That's what I see.

Thanks again for the replies guys. I have been busy the last 2 days doing audio projects for a couple bands to get tracks ready for mixing engineers. Today I have some time off, so I am back to add on....

Thanks for all the input! II'm making notes and what not for future references for sure! Thanks a million for all the detailed responses.


Actual, just the opposite. Image 2 was the analog, 3 was the digital.

As I told sanlyn, I did crop it before capturing, but it was a misunderstanding/mistake. I'm going to make sure my next capture test (hopefully today) is a raw, unaltered capture, and I will post samples again! .:congrats:

Ok guys, at the request of Lordsmurf, I am attempting to capture some video via VHS.

I just got my Panasonic AG-1980 today, and I am am not sure if I am doing everything right for the histogram ordeal. Here is what is happening...

Like I stated in a previous post in this thread, the histogram would be all black, or hardly working. I figured out how to get it to work correctly, but there is still some annoying complications going on.

In order for me to see the video I am capturing with the Happauge Live 2, I need to select 'Overlay' in the video tab on Vdub. This mode, makes the histogram NOT respond at all. It's all black, or has very few blue graph showing, and it does not move at all. If I switch to 'preview' mode,the histogram works/moves around with video without any issues. The problem with that is, the video itself goes away and doesn't show, so I can't see the video itself to see exactly what changes I am making to it. I have to switch back and forth between 'Overlay' mode and 'Preview' mode to get a happy balance for the histogram. Is this normal?

I am testing this with a VHS video that is probably a challenge as a whole. Figured that wouldn't be a bad place to start. It's a dark/dingy location with a live band playing, where stage lights of all sorts of colors are flashing randomly. It's coming from a VHS-C tape inside the VHS adapter, recorded in SLP mode, being played back in the Panasonic AG-1980. I didn't make any ajustments on the 1980, other then making sure the TBC was on, and turning off 'S-VHS' option. I am assuming that was correct since the current VHS-C is not a S-VHS tape?

I adjusted the brightness/contrast based on what I thought I should by looking at the histogram, but I am not sure about changes to hue, saturation, sharpness, ect should be made because none of them seemed to make the histogram change much. Wasn't sure if it was because they don't effect the histogram, or if the video itself and the way it was shot was causing it.

I also set the cropping values all back to 0 after looking at the histogram levels so it was not cropped while capturing, unlike the Hi8 capture earlier.

I have attached a sample for you. Let me know what you think, please!

Thanks for the new sample. Nice job.

Yes, and it's documented in the detailed settings guide (). The histogram is preview mode only. http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...-settings.html

There's a special setup for audio and USB capture, also in the guide.

Correct.

Many elements affect the histogram. Unless you have a constant start-to-end discoloration that never changes, leave hue, saturation, etc., alone.

Nice capture. I set the black levels a little darker, which is an arbitrary choice that adds a little "snap" to the image without blocking up shadows. On TV it will be visibly brighter than on a PC. It's amazing that amateurs think they can shoot in dark available light and get the same results Hollywood gets with 6 hours of setup and gigawatts of lighting. As usual the consumer camera fills the frame with plenty of grainy residual CMOS noise. It's good that you had the AG-1980 for tyhis -- it reduces CMOS a little but keeps detail (a JVC would have turned this video to mush). The rest is post-processing, with QTGMC (Step 1) to do an initial cleanup and TemporalDegrain (Step 2) with some 16-bit tweaks for the heavy lifting. All are very slow filters, CPU intensive, so I had to run the script in 2 steps. I encoded two versions, one 480i for DVD, then 640x480 square pixel for the 'net.

Step 1 script (used for Step 2 DVD and Step 2 web output):
Step 2 for DVD (uses Step 1 as YV12 input):
Step 2 for 59.94 fps 480p web use (uses Step 1 as YV12 input):

It might make more sense if I correct a couple of lines in the script from above that creates the double frame rate progressive 59.94 fps version for web posting (I forgot to change the input avi file name name from my own copy of the original):

Step 2 for 59.94 fps 480p web use (uses Step 1 as YV12 input):
Note that the capture samples were originally YUY2, which is the correct way to capture, but the output from Step 1 is YV12. You save the Step 1 file in VirtualDub by specifying in vDub what colorspace and compression you want for output. Note, also, that huffyuv can't compress YV12. So I used the Lagarith lossless compressor, which is popular for intermediate processing files and is one of huffyuv's major competitors, so to speak. I still use huffyuv for capture because it's easier on the CPU at capture time.

Lagarith: https://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html

If you adapt these scripts for your own use, be certain to change the path statements to the actual location of various files in your own system. In my case I keep all updates to the 16-but dither plugin package in a separate folder in my Avisynth program files, to maintain compatibility with older scripts.

Wow! Those AVisynth codes worked awesome! I have not dabbled in AVisynth yet, so it's still somewhat greek to me, but the fact that those clips turned out like that from one of my captures is exciting to see!

I am in between projects this week, and I am not sure how often I will be back to add on to this topic, but I am thrilled with the results of that video. I am still having a hard time wrapping my head around the YUY2 ordeal and what not, but again; it is encouraging to see the results I can get from my captures if I continue to learn the AVIsynth coding.

Will these two codes you posted be a standard in most VHS captures? Or does it vary from project to project. I have about 39 hours of VHS footage I now see I should be re-capturing and prepping for my archive.

Speaking of, what is best for archiving to a hard drive? That is one of my biggest hobbies and passions when it comes to my personal collection. I have 2 hard drives for a total of 6TBs that are for nothing but my personal vidoes, audio recordings, and videos; all sorted by date. From 2008 and on is all raw digital files from either MiniDV tapes (HDV) or tape-less cameras with memory cards (or cell phone video files). But these analog captures? do i capture them, then do all the edits into a compressed file of some sort? Or do I try and keep the raw AVI files to make changes to them after?

AVisynth looked even worse than that to me at first. I had a morbid fear of it for years, but Lordsmurf and other forum members dragged me kicking and screaming into it until one day, just out of the blue, everything clicked. The coding is actually simple in structure -- each line executes a filter or operation and the code is executed in sequence, one line after another. until the end. The first statement usually opens a video file, which of course has to be done before you can run filters on the vuideo. These scripts used the built-in AviSource() function, which opens several encoded and unencoded AVI formats.

This isn't to disparage VirtualDub, which has its own virtues. Besides being a great tool for running AVisynth scripts and saving files in lossless or encoded formats, it has several dozen filters of its own and has great tools for color correction.

The intyernet has loads of articles on video colorspaces which are excellent guides. YUY2 is is a YUV color space, meaning that it stores video data in three channels: "Y" for brightness values, "U" for blue, "V" red. In processing, green is derived by subtracting "U and "V" from "Y". YUY2 most closely resembles the YPbPr system used in VHS. The Y, U, and V channels can be worked with separately without affecting the other. Brightness "Y" can be varied without affecting "U" and "V". The YUV system was developed for TV, when engineers needed a way to make color video work with both black-and-white and color TV. A color TV could translate all three channels for color TV, while b&w TV's ignored U and V and worked only with the "Y" channel.

For every 4 chunks of "Y" data, YUY2 stores 2 "U" pixels and 2 "V" pixels. It's known as a 4:2:2 system. The YV12 colorspace, used in DVD, BluRay, broadcasting, internet, and DV, stores 1 "U" and 1 "V" pixel for every 4 "Y" pixels. So it's classed as either 4:1:1 or 4:2:0 depending on how the chroma is stored. RGB, used for display, is a different story. In RGB, each pixels stores data for brightness and all three colors in the same data chunk (4:4:4). If you vary brightness you also vary the brightness of all colors. You can work with each R, G, or B color separately without affecting the others, and with RGB you have the advantage of being able to use color tools that can work with extremely precise targeted color ranges -- very helpful with nonlinear color response as with VHS.

Avisynth has buuilt-in functions for clean and precise color conversion -- something that many high-priced NLE's perform either incorrectly or with less than stellar results. For example, Avisynth requires that you specify whether a video is interlaced or not, which some NLE's simply ignore. Yes, it does matter.

With experience, users typically settle on a toolbox of 12 plugins or so, sometimes less, along with many built-in Avisynth quickie functions like Crop() and AddBorders(). The variation in this case is that I didn't need TemporalDegrain on the earlier samples. Most Filters are specific, such as TemporalDegrain (not used that often, but good with camera CMOS noise) which is an industrial-strength degrainer that runs really slow in practise and is a memory hog. It's helped with plugins like AddGrainC, a filter that adds very fine film-like grain to video to keep it from looking over-filtered and plastic after degraining. Another favorite is aWarpSharp2(), used to help clean up edge color bleed, and Santiag(), used to smooth aliasing and ragged edges.

Now and then you encounter really horrible problems like severe dropouts (snowy static, white or black horizontal ripples, spots of all kinds, etc.) for which there are other specific filters. VirtualDub has some good tweak filters like temporalsmoother and CamcorderColorDenoise, and good ones for color work like ColorMill, gradation curves, and a battery of different histograms in ColorTools.

FYI, when I started this insane endeavor I had approx 350 hours of tapes, most of them in terrible condition recorded on cheap VCRs with a bad incoming cable signal. Pristine video isn't much of a problem. It's bad video that requires learning.

I keep my pet projects and fondest memories as original YUY2 lossless captures. Lordsmurf suggests high-bitrate (~15mbps) MPEG2 for smaller archive files. Some people use high=bitrate, small-GOP h.264 encoded to standard-def BluRay standards (Yes, the BluRay spec does include standard definition). Needless to say, I didn't keep all 350 hours of my captures.

Most workflows are like the ones shown in this thread. Capture to lossless, cleanup and edit, then encode to final delivery formats. After that, archive the originals in any of the styles mentioned above. The same for DV, which you'll notice -- after you've seen a lot of video and learn what compression artifacts and real color look like -- could stand a little cleanup before encoding for final delivery.

Thanks for color space lesson. I will look around at some more in depth information, but your basic explanation here makes a lot of sense to me. I always got confused when I saw people talking about the color sapcing and numbers ordeal, and just never really ventured in to it.

This is where I feel like some of my upcoming captures from my earlier home movie collection are going to be a little weird to handle due to 2nd, 3rd generation copying from one consumer VHS player to another. Back in the day when I was around 14 years old, my Grandma gave me a RCA VHS-C video camera that she bought back in 1993 -- the RCA CC180 (I have attached a couple pics from an eBay listing). And up until JUST NOW, I was NEVER able to find the exact model I had in any web search. For this reply, I wanted to give it another shot, and it was the very first search result from eBay that had the camera in it ha.

Anyways, I didn't have a huge amount of tapes for the camera, so I was always dropping the tapes into a VHS-C adapter, throwing together 2 VCRs (all my family had 2 or more for dubbing purposes), and once I copied them over, I ended up recording over the VHS-C tapes to reuse them. Rinse and repeat this quite a few times, and you can see where I started to have some pretty worn out VHS-C tapes that I was using to record with.

However, a lot of the VHS tapes that I used to copy the VHS-C tapes over to where brand new and only used for copying the home movies too. So I would say 28 of the 6 hour VHS tapes I have full of home movies where brand new, and only used to copy home movies over to. The only other wear and tear they have seen are playback. But the VHS-C tapes where lack luster at best, and there are several of the videos that have some damage to them, but it was because of the VHS-C tapes they were recorded from.I am not sure if much of these issues can be fixed because the source tape was the bad tape, or not.

I feel like now that this 8mm capture thread has been some what hijacked to the VHS topic. So, should we jump back over to my original VHS thread I started to continue? The link for that is here:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...roper-vhs.html

My problem is, the only capturing I plan on doing for myself is pet projects that include family videos and what not. Looks like I better look into upgrading hard drive space real quick lol. Thanks for the help as always! And again, I wanted to see if we should switch back over to the VHS thread I started. From what I have seen, Lordsmurf and the admins like to keep topics organized for other users when they are looking for help, so I figured that would be the way to go. Let me know and I'll post the reply!

I haven't experienced VHS-C work and know it only from what I see in other posts. The only camera recordings I've worked with personally were VHS, and they're all nightmares because of the way the cameras were (mis-)handled. WIth any tape format, tape-to-tape dubs are generally awful and require some patience. Some of the noise is mechanically caused and problems such as scanline sync distortion are unfortunately permanent aspects of the recordings and can't be corrected by a tbc during capture. Still, people do what they can with these dubs. The tapes remain important, and while they can't be fully corrected they can be improved.

If VHS is now a focus for you, probably better to return to that thread.

I will move over to that thread and share a couple samples of a current capture I am working on. VHS is my focus at this point now that I have received my Panasonic AG-1980. Thanks again!