Avisynth filters to finetune LaserDisc captures?

[DigitalConvergence]

I have a LaserDisc collection of about 75 titles and have been capturing a number of them in OBS Studio via the Hauppauge 610 Video Capture Device connected to my Pioneer CLD-V2800 player and ASUS ProArt P16 laptop. It took me a year of experimenting with various settings in OBS after recording lots of discs, but I finally settled on a group of core settings that yield me a completed capture I am pleased with. All my discs are NTSC and live action, although I plan to add several animated and anime titles as well. I’ve been capturing them at a resolution of 640x480 and with a color space of Rec. 601 (limited range of colors). While the preset fps in my Hauppauge settings is 29.97, I set the Common FPS Values for the output in OBS’ settings to 59.94 fps after reading posts that frames actually get dropped or deleted if captured at lower frame rates. I would rather continue capturing at 59.94 or 60 for the output because I don’t want to lose any frames. OBS automatically converts all interlaced content to progressive. I’ve been recording both the analog and stereo mixes in PCM. The majority of them sound excellent.

Throughout the second half of this year, I’ve been researching and learning about many filters and scripts in Avisynth, which I want to use for much of my post-processing work. I have StaxRip (version 2.50.2-x64) and many plugins/filters from the archived package, which also include those for Vapoursynth that I downloaded from GitHub. I’ve been assembling a tentative plan for my workflow and would especially welcome your suggestions to tweak or perhaps add different filters. Feedback on parameters and preset values is also much appreciated.

I have watched at least 60 of my LDs and want the filters to take care of the most common global issues associated with this analog format: chroma noise, jagged edges/shimmering, dot crawl, rainbow patterns, and random video artifacts that pop up. (I may engage in more extensive frame-by-frame restorations for certain titles.) While I would like to clean up those anomalies to a considerable degree, I want to preserve the original texture and detail of the image as much as possible. I have envisioned my restoration project in three parts:

(1) Since nearly every one of my titles was originally shot on film before transfer to LD, I will perform an inverse telecine for each. Since there may have been duplicate frames created during capture, I will make sure TDecimate is part of my script. All of this goes towards converting 59.94 to 23.976.

(2) Anti-aliasing, very moderate noise reduction, and restoration cleanup.

(3) I will be eventually transferring the finished file to a BD-R (720p), which I’ll watch on my QLED TV. I have a region-free Sony Blu-ray player that has an option to output precisely at 720p. At this stage, I will want to convert YUV to RGB and Rec. 601 to Rec. 709. I will be upscaling/resizing the captured SD files to 960x720.

Here are my scripts and projected order for each job’s workflow:

Part 1

Field:

TIVTC
TFM().TDecimate()
cthresh=255

Frame Rate:

ChangeFPS(24000, 1001)

Part 2

Line:

DAA
daa3mod()

Noise:

mClean(thSAD=400, chroma=true, sharp=10, rn=14, deband=4, depth=0, strength=20)

Restoration:

ChubbyRain2(th=10, radius=10, sft=10) # progressive sources only
DOTKILLS(ITERATIONS=1)

Note: I also will probably use DeScratch to minimize and/or remove scratches/tramlines from B&W movies and older films shot in color.

Part 3

Color: YUV / RGB
YUV to RGB

Dither_convert_yuv_to_rgb()
ColorMatrix(mode="rec.601->rec.709")

I will be using ffmpeg - ProRes as my encoder.
Encoder command line:

Custom: --colorprim bt709 --transfer bt709 --colormatrix bt709

MOV is my container.

Spline64Resize(960, 720, 0, 0.5)

[aramkolt]

It's kind of hard to get past your first step when capturing interlaced content as progressive with OBS. This is an unnecessary and un-reversible type of generation loss. One of the biggest quality boosts possible is better deinterlacing and that can vary based on the content and is typically not done in realtime during the capture.

I'm not one of those that would say that OBS is the worst thing ever in all cases, but odds are that most of your content is actually telecined meaning that an interlaced 29.97 capture can be restored to ~24FPS progressive that it would have been for the original film content. That's not something you can do with anything but an original interlaced capture.

Seems like you have hardware that will support interlaced capture, so you might as well capture interlaced and avoid OBS for that part at least is my first suggestion. Maybe post a short 5 second capture from OBS and then an interlaced capture from something like Amarec or Virtualdub and we should be able to point out the differences.

I also would suggest capturing at 720x480 since there is probably more horizontal resolution present that you are discarding for no reason, especially if you plan to upscale later (which I personally would do to at least 720P - so that's 960x720 for 4:3 aspect ratio with square pixels).

[lordsmurf]

OBS screwed up the capture, so Avisynth won't do much good now.

OBS was made to screen record video games, not to capture analog tapes. The OBS "capture" function is not the same as actual capture, as it taps into the preview layers, and not the actual card. It's essentially still just a screen recorder.