Workflow critique of YouTube upload?
 

Hello everyone. While waiting to receive a Cypress frame TBC from Lordsmurf to replace my Kramer FC-400. Decided to digitize one final piece with it, being the intro interview segment included on the 1997 Jaws Widescreen Edition VHS release.

Ended up using the following capture workflow

JVC SR-M45U S-VHS VCR (Line TBC On) > Kramer FC-400 Frame TBC > Pinnacle 510 USB > VirtualDub 1.9 running on Windows XP

After capture I decided to use Selur's Hybrid to encode the raw avi file for uploading to YouTube. (upscaling, masking and deinterlacing with QTGMC) As well as doing some basic restoration (Using Avisynth's Temporal NR and Edge Cleaner filters) No audio adjustments were made.

The end result being the following video -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeNY_9yxAPo

Also included in this thread are two samples from the raw avi file. Sadly there a four points that I noticed in the 10 minute video where vertical jitter is present for a few amounts of frames, with the second sample demonstrating the problem. The hi-fi audio track plays perfectly fine while the jitter occurs, so I don't suspect the problem being with the VCR or tape itself (checked the tape and it looked perfectly clean, the VCR also didn't make any strange noises while playing it back)

Although the capture and restoration might not exactly be perfect or the best I could potentially do, I'm just asking for other user's opinions to see if what I've been able to do so far is of decent, watchable quality.

Thanks!

I quickly skimmed the 10-minute Youtube clip.

What is the time code for the 4 jitter spots? Is this one of those? https://youtu.be/PeNY_9yxAPo?t=304

Retail tapes are not what most people think. Most of them are contact duplicated, not recorded, which has a unique set of errors that can trip up VCRs, TBCs, and capture cards. This is why many of us own multiples of each. There is no video "one ring to rule them all".

That aside, quality is as expected. Perhaps some leveling/value issues, but nothing out of bounds. That's not you, just standard tape quality, sometimes present.

Yes, that is one of the times the jittering happens. It happens a few other times throughout the video. There also a few audio clicks on the right channel, but that seems? to be normal for hi-fi and could probably easily be fixed with an audio editing program.

I apologize if I didn't make myself clear, I meant four times as in "there are four sections of the recording where small jittering is present" not so much "this scene quickly jitters four times before returning back to normal"

I probably won't recapture this tape again as I did it for the heck of it. Ended up going through with it in order to hear from folks on if the results I'm getting from digitizing these sort of tapes are at an expected quality level from the likes of you and others on this forum to help out with my goal, which is to digitize and preserve precious family home videos in the best quality possible (from a capture standpoint, not so much restoration.. I admit it's pretty basic as I don't wanna feel overwhelmed about using more complicated filters)

While my goal isn't the capture retail movie tapes, the box I have of them works great when they are used to test out the pieces of equipment!

Though yeah, I understand how these often copy protected movie tapes aren't the best examples to figure out if a jitter or other tracking bug is due to the nature of the tape, the VCR, or even the line and/or field TBC. Had a nasty Fast Times at Ridgemont High tape that produced macrovision tearing on the top image when the VCR's line TBC was enabled for example.

All in all, thank you for your input, happy to hear I seem to be doing a fine enough job :)

Using my technique described here.

Ah, that certainly does improve things! Good work!

Perhaps I should use this for tapes I get that end up having small jitter that my equipment would be unable to correct.

Overall well done. Maybe I'm particularly aware of sync issues but the picture appears to lag behind the audio a frame or two. This is commonly caused by a small picture delay created by an external TBC. In your editor just delay the audio by a frame or so until there is no appreciable sync problem.

Thanks for the positive response, while slowing down the video by half speed the audio sync issue was apparent. Hoping that enabling "Do not resync audio and video" in VirtualDub's timing settings wasn't the cause of the issue.

I might attempt to recapture this after I get the Cypress TBC.