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  #1  
12-31-2020, 02:00 PM
willow5 willow5 is offline
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Dear all,

Happy New Year!

I have been having various intense debates with various people over the festive period regarding the use of filters/scripts to post process analogue artrfacts, noise and such like.

There are various schools of thought for 1st generation tapes here ranging from keeping them raw is best through to the other end of the spectrum where you must post process every tape!

I am a total novice and therefore not qualified to have such debates. Therefore I am struggling to justify the need for post processing. Can anyone help me to:

A) understand this better myself so I can have better informed discussions and
B) tell me what the purist view is

I know that each recording and tape is different so it is horses for courses but I just want to understand the fundamentals first.

Thank you!
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  #2  
12-31-2020, 02:18 PM
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lordsmurf lordsmurf is online now
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Quote:
Originally Posted by willow5 View Post
from keeping them raw is best
Very often, this is just an excuse to be lazy.

There is actually no such things as "raw". All video gets processed between tape and capture, and therefore the prevailing issue is how well that processing is, and how agreeable the tape is to being processed. Bad gear makes every tape look terrible, good gear makes many (but never all) tapes look extremely acceptable without much/any further work.

After capture, sometimes you still need processing, beyond what the hardware could do. Video is supposed to be enjoyable, and distractions take away from that enjoyment. If processing restores enjoyment, then you restore the video.

Quote:
through to the other end of the spectrum where you must post process every tape!
I specialize in restoration, so my sources needing advanced work is often a given. However not all projects are damaged, and need no further attention after capture.

Doing ALL tapes is excessive, and doing NO tapes is lazy and uncaring (ie, why even bother converting). The reality is that the tapes themselves determine needs, not you (royal you).

Quote:
B) tell me what the purist view is
I dislike video purists. I've stated this often over the years. I'm a realist. (Also not pessimist or optimist, both of which I find divorced from reality.)

Purists have no concept of nuance, and have the classics binary worldview (black and white, "us vs. them"). Reality is shades of gray, the understanding that you can be both for AND against (or neither for nor against). Purists ALWAYS do A, never B, and have no more letters in their alphabet (which is probably why they can't form coherent sentences at times).

At the opposite spectrum is lazy SOBs, usually cheapskates, overly forgiving ("oh, it doesn't matter" aka "good enough"), dismissive of errors, etc. You could poke out both of their eyes, ask them how it looks, and you'd get an answer of "it looks fine to me!"

But most people fall within a middle spectrum.

Quote:
I know that each recording and tape is different so it is horses for courses but I just want to understand the fundamentals first.
Then it seems you already understand.

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  #3  
12-31-2020, 02:24 PM
willow5 willow5 is offline
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Thank you @lordsmurf

Bearing in mind I am working with my own 1st generation recordings and have the ideal setup i.e. Windows XP with AGP, AIW 9600, TBC 1000 and an FS200, what kind of things would I be looking for that could trigger some form of restoration? To my untrained eye, the captures I am making seem to be as good as sticking a VHS player into my TV directly and playing a tape straight from the player. It is hard to tell any difference. However, the issue I am having is the file sizes that are being created are huge and prevents me from sharing them so the only need I have is to compress the file size down.
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12-31-2020, 02:32 PM
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Looking like a tape isn't good enough for 1st gen masters. It shouldn't look like a tape at all with S-VHS VCRs, TBCs, AIW capture cards. It should look more like "a signal" and not "a tape".

Would you also say it looks as clean as SD broadcast TV? Because then you'd be getting the max quality for sure.

After capture, large lossless files are proccessed down for sharing online, and deinterlace. Or are you mailing discs to share? Both?

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  #5  
12-31-2020, 02:37 PM
willow5 willow5 is offline
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I wouldn't say the captures are as clean as broadcast SD TV but equally I wouldn't say that you could tell they were recorded 20+ years ago, to me, they look like they were recorded yesterday. So somewhere in between I guess.

My recordings are for sharing online not for DVD/discs. Can you guide me on how to deinterlace and process down in vdub please?
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12-31-2020, 02:57 PM
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After capture:

the essentials =
- mask overscan -- which helps the encode quality on post-capture encodes
- deinterlace
- correct aspect (AR)
- resize if uploading to Youtube
- encode H264

That's if it look good as-is, no quality problems.

This is actually easy to do with an Avisynth script dropped into Hybrid/ Hybrid alone can do it, but easier in a script.

You need to install selur's Hybrid: https://www.selur.de

I can give you a script, when I get to my other system tomorrow. You will have to learn how to edit it, in order to get the mask correct on each tape.

It will be easier to do with Avisynth and AvsPmod install. So perhaps install that as well.
- https://avs-plus.net/
- https://avspmod.github.io/

64-bit used for this task of mask/deinterlace/AR/resize.

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  #7  
12-31-2020, 03:17 PM
willow5 willow5 is offline
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Thank you my lord!

To be honest I only have the 32 version of XP and was hoping it could simply be all done in vdub. Is there a more simplistic option of saving the same file differently in vdub? If I need a 64 bit version of windows I am going to struggle to do this. Having said that could it be any version of windows like windows 10?
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  #8  
12-31-2020, 03:31 PM
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You can do 32-bit, but it's much slower. What are the specs of the computer? If too slow, it won't work, either well or at all. Capture systems are rarely good for post-capture tasks (edit, encode, etc).

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