Assistance restoring this broadcast capture?
 

Hi all,

I hope things are going well for everyone. I have successfully completed my first capture from VHS. If there are any U2 fans here, I captured a portion of my father's original VHS recording of a Pay-Per-View broadcast of their ZOO TV Sydney concert. My workflow consisted of a JVC HR-S7800U --> Datavideo TBC-4000 --> ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0 --> Windows XP PC. I captured using VirtualDub and HuffyUV YUY2 to a lossless AVI file, and then I encoded to a mp4 file (not sure if I did that last step correctly) solely to attach below. I would really appreciate some help improving the capture.

I came across this thread where user @sanlyn created this awesome post with a before and after comparison of his beautiful restoration work on a similar TV broadcast. I would love to get that work out of my capture. He noted "The repair, restoration, telecine removal and color grading were done with free filters and tools from Avisynth and Virtualdub." I was hoping someone here knew the specifics on which filters to use and which settings to choose with said filters to achieve results similar to sanlyn's. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you so much!

The red channel is clipped in the .mp4, it's causing skin tones to look wrong. If you could post a short clip of the original HuffYUV, it might be possible to fix it.

Attachment 17138

Hi traal,

Thank you for the reply! I have attached a ten second clip of the original losslessly compressed AVI. I had actually forgot that I had used HuffyUV_MT (multi-threaded) to compress this capture. This was before I knew that the multi threaded variant may not be the best. I can certainly redo the capture with standard HuffyUV if necessary. Other than the fact that I used the multi-threaded variant, is there anything else wrong with my capture setup? Just trying to figure out what could cause this color issue. I have the Line TBC of the JVC VCR enabled, the Video Stabilizer and Calibration of the VCR is off, and Digital R3 is also off. The Picture Control is also set to auto. I really appreciate the help, thank you!

Just curious, how did you determine the red is clipped specifically?

With VirtualDub filters, there are multiple ways to correct.

I corrected quickly and then encoded with Ripbot264. We can certainly do better (see attached file)

Definitely an improvement for sure! Which filters did you use and is there a particular guide you generally follow when restoring video? There's so many filters in virtualdub that it's hard to tell exactly what does what and what some of the downsides are (assume things like image softening etc) of each filter.

Lastly, I know virtualdub2 isn't recommended for actual capture, but on the video restoration side, are there any downsides to using the newer version of virtualdub?

Wow, this is an amazing start! Thank you for the time you put into this!

I echo @aramkolt; which filters were used here? Thank you for any information you can provide! And thank you to everyone for the helpful replies.

One of the big advancements in quality you'll see is from the actual deinterlacing with QTGMC which can be done pretty easily through the Hybrid app (that's the detelecine he describes) - though that is usually the final step after you've gotten any sort of filters/color correction/editing done. I'm less sure of the appropriate ways to use various virtualdub filters or other Hybrid features beyond cropping/scaling which are pretty self explanatory. Issue with virtualdub is that there are so many filters that exist it's hard to know which ones to use for what.

Thanks for the valuable information! I think I'm at the same place you are, I'm just not sure which VirtualDub filters to use and which settings to use for each one. I'm looking forward to hearing what @qwertz73 has to say about the improvements he made!

Thanks again for the insight! :)

If I need to correct, I use the "Color Mill (2.1) and "6-axix color correction" filter first.

In attached file, the effect of the settings with Color Mill (2.1)

Attachment 17143

Attachment 17144

Wow, thank you so much for the settings! I really appreciate it! If you have the time, I’d love to know the other filters you used and their settings. Or, just a list of the filters if you’re short on time. Thank you so much for all the advice! :)

VirtualDub2 added artifacts and glitches to certain filters, especially resize and null.

I'll take a look in a few days, busy now, but Color Mill is definitely one of the easier color correction tools, while still being powerful. Premiere can often do better, but learning curve, and how much better sometimes isn't worth the effort. Premiere is my method when Color Mill just can't cut it, which isn't too often.

Remember, in VirtualDub, you can also stack filters. So correct some, another filter to correct more.

And then Avisynth for non-CC, pre-pass before the CC.

Hi everyone,

I went ahead and attempted to color correct using ColorMill based on qwertz73's example, and here is what I got. While the skin tones certainly look much better and the purple splotch visible on the top of the original in attachment #2 has disappeared, the purple of the guitarist's shirt and the vibrant yellow of the guitar in attachment #1 are unfortunately lost. It looks like I'll need some further help color correcting.

Lordsmurf, I do have access to Premiere through my university. Do you have any advice on this specific capture and color correcting it with Premiere? I attempted to use it but I didn't get very far. I couldn't eliminate the purple splotch present in the second attachment with Premiere.

Thank you so much to anybody who can help me! I really appreciate it!