You're going to have to fill in some blanks here. How does Firefox figure in this workflow? What are you exporting with AE (I assume you mean some edited/joined segments)?

Menu animations for an unrelated DVD.

Previously, if I was running an encode I wouldn't be able to browse the web while it was going; I'd have to pause it if I needed to do anything. That is no longer the case.

Same with MeGUI running a Blu-Ray encode at the moment, and not really impacting the performance of Firefox. The browser is irrelevant to the encoding process, it just seemed like maybe more of the processor was focused on the encoding previously? Or maybe this is a positive, and it's evidence my new one is capable of more. It's not really my area. First pass is estimated at a couple of hours, and used to be four or five at a minimum, so there's that.

What does all of this have to do with how you're matching shots? If you're running other apps and encodes and browsing the net, you can't complain about how fast or slow your basketball project is running.

Nothing whatsoever, they're two unrelated subjects. The speed of my machine in general is relevant to actually running those MCTD scripts, and the hardware replacement is the reason I had to put this on hold, so it ties back into the broader picture of the project as a whole but doesn't relate to the color work specifically.

Right now, I have other more urgent things that have stacked up while my computer has been dead - mostly getting current-season games from my near-full PVR to Blu-Ray discs - and I need to go back over things as it's been so long I've forgotten large parts of what I'm doing. I ran the test file straight off the bat just because I was really curious as to how it would compare; I've since been doing other things while trying to get an idea of how much of a speed/performance difference there is.

You're certainly busy. I run one project at a time, if no other reason than to take a break from the tough work on the bad capture I mentioned. I'll be getting back to that one for a few hours today. But it looks as if speed and other matters have improved in all respects. It's not uncommon for that project t be interrupted for days or weeks to attend to other matters, like all of the old TV shows I'm recording and editing on a DVD recorder to watch on weekends. (Why do they have to show all the good old stuff in the middle of the night???). I just finished re-syncing an HD capture from TCM, as that HD PVR does odd things to audio when the transmission is noisy. Takes about a boring hour to demux, remux, edit a movie and transfer it to a hard drive for playing on the OPPO later.

Yes, indeed. There's plenty going on. I like to do work on one thing at a time and take breaks when I get tired. Color work is time consuming in itself. I fix color, then let it rest a day or two and come back, and it will not look the way I thought, so I'm at it again. It's a matter of prioritizing and not wearing myself out.

Speaking of priorities, I'm over two hours late for lunch.

If you work in RGB, any clipping in YUV will be permanent; there is no way to retrieve data after it's clipped. You'll have to work in YUV with Premiere and you'll have to use PP's saturation controls to target specific color ranges, if that's possible in YUV -- which I don't think is available with PP unless you're in RGB. If you find a way to stop the chroma flicker in Premiere, go right ahead. I don't see that it's possible to target that kind of glitch with PP or any other NLE. But mnif you want to try and invent a new wheel, it's up to you.

Hardly a new wheel, lordsmurf has mentioned doing things that way a few times.

Obviously I'd need to do some work in AviSynth first, to make everything RGB-safe and whatever else Premiere can't do, but I get the impression from what lordsmurf has said in other threads that Premiere and After Effects might be the way to go for matching the colors of the different angles, etc. But I'm not sure exactly how I'd need to break it up, in terms of what needs to be done in AviSynth before it's ready for Adobe.

But regarding RGB conversion, is it necessary to add that to the end of an AviSynth script? VDub will do that conversion on its own if it needs to, and if it doesn't surely it's better to stay in YUV all the way to DVD?

The reason it's done in Avisynth is because Avisynth affords the means to do so with greater precision. If you're working in YV12 in Avisynth and you open that file as YV12 into Premiere and allow Premiere to make the conversion to RGB and back to YV12 fo encoding you're asking for trouble. Conversion between colorspaces is subject to numeric rounding and chroma placement errors, and errors based on frame structure, which Avisynth holds to a minimum. NLE's aren't as adept at that sort of thing and to a lesser neither is Virtualdub. You probably won't see a difference.

If you want to try Premiere for the color work It's up to you. Premiere isn't likely to resolve the flicker problem. If you found a way of matching colors between two videos using Adobe apps, that's OK. I have no problems doing it in Avisynth and VirtualDub and do it all the time.

The other thing, just having a play around with it now, is that it's kind of hard to tell what color things actually are due to all the chroma noise. So should I be doing any color correction at all in the first step?

The flickering filters, YUV levels and de-spot processing take enough time as it is. I did additional color tweaks in Virtualkdub, which is where the RGB conversion came in. In Virtualdub's output I saved the RGB color work as YV12 because the next step was joining segments and encoding.

Compared to what? Not sure what this is a response to.

I think you forgot your own question. Go back to the question you asked in post #209. Fixing the chroma flicker is part of color correction, and no you don't have to do 100% of the color correction at the same time. I did part of that in VirtualDub after running the Avisynth filters. Remember that you do have some moments of illegal luma and chroma levels brighter than y=235 that have to be fixed before you convert to RGB for color work, whether you work with RGB color in Virtualdub or in Premiere, as mentioned in previous posts.

I need to review this whole thread, but wanted to comment on this one tidbit.

Chroma NR/correction affects color. And color correction can affect chroma noise. It can lead to catch-22 situations, and is one reason (of many) that I always remind people that restoration is about making things better, not perfect. Yes, as perfect as possible. Keyphrase = "as possible".

Just to flesh out sanlyn's statement. :2cents:

You said that a certain process took enough time 'as it is', implying a comparison with a different process. I'm not sure what that alternate process is that you had in mind.

Okay, basically, I went to work with a frame and it seemed really red. And I went to the next frame and it seemed really green. Just because of the noise, it varies wildly from one frame to the next which makes it impossible to know what adjustments should be made. So is it better to attack the noise first in that instance, and everything else later?

Yeah, I'm across that. What I'm wondering is whether I bother to do anything other than making them legal in AviSynth, then use VDub/Adobe for the rest.

Can you elaborate on the process of using After Effects and Premiere for color work?

And while I've got you, what do I need in order to run that super-awesome top-secret script of yours? This new CPU isn't behaving with Windows 7 at all, and the i7-6700K is looking awful tempting.

The initial processing stage included smoothing chroma flicker and luma flicker, cleaning spots and dropouts, cleaning up edges (halos, chroma bleed), and adjusting overall levels where required, not to forget cleaning up tape noise. Those are slow running processes. What remained after that is overall color balance and gamma tweaking, which I did in VirtualDub where it was needed.

It's better to attack boise first and it's better to do that in YUV before moving into RGB for other filters. You wouldn't want to shuttle back and forth between colorspaces. Work in YUV, then work in RGB. YUV->RGB->YUV->RGB accumulates numeric rounding and sampling errors.

Illegal levels should be adjusted in YUV first. The subject of how bad levels results in clipped brights and/or crushed darks when converted to RGB has already been covered. Once these problems occur in RGB, you can't retrieve those details.

sanlyn is a hard-core Avisynth user, and it does work, but it hampers my workflow for color. I'd rather take the minimal hit for colorspace conversion (because it's already damaged anyway), and process visually in Premiere. NLE correction is simply how video is done professionally, and it's how I've been doing color work since the 90s. Being forced to script color work is so 1980s, and I'd hate video if everything was scripted. It's already bad enough that most restoration has to be scripted.

There's really nothing to elaborate on about using Premiere. You import the file to the bin, drag to timeline, correct it with the nice Adobe color tools. Photoshop can work with video since CS5, but I've never used it.

You PM'd me about the i7-6700K, but I don't see that post...

That's the CPU that I use. I've had that CPU since Nov 2015. Even now, in 2017, there's really nothing faster. New CPUs have made only nominal gains. Ars has lamented the fact several times in the past 6 months alone. What I really like about it is low TDP, aka low heat. And for me, low heat output matters.

I can lay out the entire specs of my system, if you want to read it. Good cases and coolers are really important. And for me, quietness also matters. I want to restore hiss, not make it. I hate wind tunnel computers.

I posted both here at at VH back in October 2015, when I was shopping as well. I was also soliciting advice on what exists now (2015/2016), versus when I last built a system (2009). Things changed quite a bit. I'm now up to speed.

What I do in Avisynth for color is fix basic levels, which in these samples needs real work, and apply filters in YUV to fix the bad flicker that was apparently caused by previous processing. Color grading and matching (aka "color timing"), which is a different story, I do in VirtualDub/RGB, Photoshop, or AfterEffects/ColorFinesse. Final color grading is almost impossible in Avisynth, IMO. So I'd advise as you do that final color work is best done in something like Premiere Pro. But I know of no way to repair the chroma flicker or dropouts + comets in Premiere.

All of adobe's "Pro" apps feature extensive help and tutorials concerning quality color work. The shortcoming many users have with upscale NLE's is that they use them like $50 Walmart specials, which is a waste of money and of the capabilities built into pro-level software.

Well, that's good to know. The thing to remember is that there is no one correct tool -- there are several correct tools. We have options. What we want to do is steer newbies (and even pros! yikes!) away from all the crapware. What I do NOT want to do is turn them off of quality software, even if it's not to personal preference.

Even Walmart doesn't carry much software, and never really did. But I get your dig, and I agree. Sort of. The problem is that most cheap software has multiple flaws, often catastrophic ones. Best Buy is actually worse than Walmart. But those fake "best software" sites lead others to junk owned by the same few Chinese hacks that simply put a GUI on freeware for $50. You don't want any of that. So using a quality tool, even if just for a few features, can be worth it. There really is no middle ground with software -- it's either free, or pro. The in-between stuff is often worse than both.

Honestly, I don't use a whole lot of Premiere, and never really did. I probably could have done what I needed in whizbang cheapo-ware, but at a potential quality loss, and with some degree of frustration because the vendor made the software overly simplistic. Even Adobe is guilty of that, and it's why Encore was a huge turd of an authorware program

Now, I've always been a proponent of freeware. So if quality freeware exists, I use it, and tell others. Examples: Simple DVD Creator, Avidemux, Avisynth, VirtualDub, Hybrid, and many more. And some low-cost software (not "cheap") is good, too. Example: TMPGEnc Plus, $29, for many years.

Well, sure (not that I know how to use half of them). It's more a question of how much work to do at which stage. Obviously color-legalisation is best done in AviSynth, noise would be AviSynth/VDub...

I saw sanlyn recommend Alexis van Hurkman's Color Correction Handbook in another thread, so I've ordered a copy.

It's the same post. The very next paragraph.

Yeah, I found a comparison site and the difference between the 7700K and the 6700K didn't seem like much. The 7700K requires updating to Windows 10, too, at least in theory. I'm using an i5-7400 at the moment, and it seems to work okay.

I've just put in a Hyper 212x, and added a bunch of fans, in the process of trying to solve the overheating issue I was having that was causing problems with the noise removal script. Went from temps in the mid-90s to being unable to crack 60, and that's in Australia in the middle of summer.

Had to take the motherboard off, so it seemed like a good time to upgrade everything anyway. Unfortunately this was just after Kaby Lake processors became available, so they didn't have any stock of Skylake, and I've ended up with this. I've managed to find somewhere I can get an i7-6700K, so that's the plan. Then hopefully I can get rid of the i5 on eBay or something.

Previously I'd have just given up, but the Hyper is really easy to get in and out, so a CPU replacement shouldn't be too much hassle. With the stock intel cooler just getting it back in was a three-day exercise.

Cheers, this is the sort of answer I was looking for. As mentioned above, I've ordered a copy of that book you recommended elsewhere, so I should be able to get the job done properly.

This has turned out to be ridiculously expensive, by the way. I'm starting to see the appeal of the previous DVD/VHS combo unit just-get-it-done-cheap-and-quick method that was used on these tapes. Unfortunately with the importance of this footage, it really does need to be done well. I still need to buy a working ES10, too.

What do you use?

What's wrong with Encore?

I really like the Cooler Master Hyper 212 heatsinks, and use them on family computers, but they're quaint compared to the Noctua NH-D14. The Noctua is quiet and cooler. The fans makes almost zero noise. It does bring temps down at least another 5 degrees. At full CPU load, maybe even 10 degrees. It helps that the 6700k has low TDP.

Oh, I use Premiere, just not all the tools inside it. Mostly color, basic video asset assembly, some blending effects. The video are very professional, but just lack the moving graphics you often see. I heavily use Premiere to create DVD motion menu in years past. That is an art unto itself.

Encore doesn't follow the spec. I disallows legal items and sizes. It focuses on basic 720x480/576 DVDs, and was very consumery as a result.