Still images don't give enough information, so one can only guess. The subject is video, not still cameras -- noise looks and behaves differently in motion. How to create your edited selection;
- Open an unmodified original .avi capture in
VirtualDub.
- Use the scroll and edit icons in the bottom left corner of VDub's window to cut your selection. About 8 to 10 seconds of losslesly compressed video with some form of motion (people moving, gesturing, moderate camera motion) will fit within the upload size limit.
- To preserve the original compression and colorspace, click "Video..." -> "direct stream copy" before saving your sample.
- Save your .avi sample, then consult this thread about uploading:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/news...ly-upload.html
Offhand from the images posted there appear to be invalid video levels in the captures (clipped brights, crushed blacks), but as I say it's difficult to judge from still images that have had colorspace conversions. If the noise you mention doesn't appear from your other player, then I'd say it's likely that your 1980p needs work. If the nightmare color moire in the first image exists in all frames, it can't be fixed. If it's possible to reduce the lesser noise in your second 1980p image, it certainly couldn't be done with Premiere Pro. PP isn't a repair app, it's an editor. You'd need Avisynth.
Quote:
Originally Posted by sevarre
In general, from what I can tell there are a few fundamental "classes" of issues:
Not Fixable: Stuff like the quality of the recording being incredibly poor, medium damaged beyond repair, etc...
Fixable Before Capture: Improving capture gear, repairing damaged medium, adding an external TBC, etc...
Fixable During Capture: Not sure if anything is in this category. Would include things you could do during capture. Maybe things like only having Virtualdub open
Fixable After Capture: Processing in Avisynth or Premiere Pro, etc...
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Poor quality, damage beyond repair? We've seen many of those, but we've also seen many that could be repaired to a certain extent or at least made watchable. Links to some sample restoration projects are posted in a later paragraph, below.
Fixable During Capture: Using either an external proc amp or the capture device's proc amp connection in VirtualDub, the filtration most often used is a full-speed brightness and contrast controls to adjust input levels to the required YUV y=16-235 range for safe digital signal levels. How this is done and measured in Virtualdub capture via the histogram, proc amp, and temporary cropping control is shown in the advanced VDub capture guide,
post #3 and
post #4 .
External proc amps are sometimes used for very elementary color correction, but such units are optimized for analog capture (pro gear for digital sources are not appropriate); these are quite expensive, such as the Sign Video PA-100, and are not as effective as post-process RGB controls but are useful for controlling signal levels. Besides, VHS will change color balance with almost every scene change, which can be highly frustrating at capture time and not easily undone later. The DNR in most VCR's is adequate for captures, although many advanced users realize that far more sophisticated denoisers are available in post-process and will often disable the DNR. There are no decent denoisers that you can use during capture; they're too slow, too CPU-intensive, usually require unwanted colorspace changes, and are really too destructive. Sharpners are forbidden: there is nothing uglier or worse than trying to work with VHS noise and other defects that have been sharpened during capture.
Fixable After Capture: glitches such as those displayed in your #2 1980p image are repaired after capture: fuzzy DCT edge ringing artifacts (look at the gal's legs); an associated effect is in the right-hand figure, where there are obvious edge halos on high contrast edges (a bright edge halo on the left, a thick black edge halo on the right); not to mention signs of typical "floating grunge" from frame to frame with the usual VHS noise, and some false contouring in the right-hand man's face and suit due to mild posterizing effects. Add to that the illegal video levels and mild clipping and you need Avisynth, which has specialized filters that address those problems and more. Unfortunately Premiere can't do anything with those defects.
Premiere Pro shouldn't be on the list of repair tools, but it does have its uses. As mentioned earlier PP is an editor, not a restoration app. Like most NLE's it has serious limitations: it doesn't resize, deinterlace, or inverse telecine very well, is sloppy at some colorspace conversions, and has no talent for denoising. On the other hand it has excellent advanced color correction and masking/blending tools (which most owners don't learn to use even though they paid big bucks to get them), has good special transition and timeline features when working with lossless input files, and can do some decent DVD, BluRay, and web encoding.
Most repair, cleanup, and restoration work is done post-capture using Avisynth and VirtualDub together. The capture and restoration areas of the forum have hundreds of cleanup threads, many with extensive details on the filters and techniques used, and feature everything from mildly ugly artifacts to very ugly aging/damage/processing blunders and stupid filming errors. In reply to a request for restoration samples, a collection of several past projects was listed in an earlier thread in
post #11 and
post #10.
There are hundreds of other before-after posts. One is an unfiltered mp4 example of a capture of a noisy ancient analog cable tv broadcast of a 1954 movie recorded at slow 6-hour speed on a cheap VCR and cheap VHs tape 28 years ago. The original, telecined unaltered cap is
Liv5A_cut_EP_original_cap.mp4 (33mb). The result after cleanup with avisynth and VirtualDub is the inverse telcined/denoised/color corrected
Liv5A_ivtc_cut_EP_playback sample.mp4 (33mb). That capture was made with a Panasonic PV-S4670 VCR, a Panasonic DMR-ES10 line tc pass-thru, an AVT-8710 frame-level tbc, a PA-100 proc amp for level control, and either an ATI All in Wonder 7500 AGP Radeon or 9600XT AGP capture card (I don't recall which one) using VirtualDub capture and
huffYUV/YUY2.
A series of demo posts on how to use various Avisynth filters and VirtualDub advanced image filters is in
Information Overload #2,
Information Overload #3, and
Information Overload #4.
There are enough samples and discussions in the capture and restoration forums to keep anyone busy and full of ideas and resources for a very long time.