How do I clean up captured video before authoring my DVD?

[IJM]

Hi,

Right, I've finally bought my ADVC-100. It is the business. I've captured a video from VHS (PAL) and it's looking okay. It's got the usual sort of VHS problems, video noise and so forth. Now, I want to clean it up and put it onto DVD-R.

I can do the MPEG2 encode, author a DVD and so-forth; that isn't a problem. But what I've just realised is that there don't seem to be any guides here on DVDHelp.com about post-capture video clean up.

You know; how to eliminate noise, how to sharpen it up and so on. I know that I'll never look as good as something that was authored on DVD in the first place. But still, I'm sure that you can make it look better than it came off the tape, and maybe fiddle with it to make it look as though it might have come from DVD in the first place. I'm not expecting miracles, just a realistic guide to what is possible.

My video is live action as opposed to animated. What I want is a rough guide to cleaning up video. How to eliminate noise whilst retaining as much detail as possible. How to sharpen it without overdoing it. What to look for, what the tricks of the trade are, what the pitfalls are, what the trade-offs are. Maybe even an indication of the better tools and filters to use.

I know that some of you out there are video professionals, others are experienced enthusiasts. I'm surprised that there isn't a guide specialising in this particular field.

I hope you can help.

Ian.

[IJM]

Hi,

Okay, I've asked the question and got no replies (never mind). So, I've managed to dig deeper and found the answer myself. For your benefit, I've decided to post what I've found below:

• Nicky Pages' Digital Solutions - More Filter Tricks (Cleaning Up Video With VirtualDub Filters)
  Luke's Video Guide - High Resolution Video Processing

These seem to be quite good. But every snippet of information will be of help, so if you know of any more such guides about postprocessing cleanup, please let me know.

I've got some old degraded VHS tapes that I'd like to capture and restore, so any such guides specialising in video restoration would be brilliant.

Many Thanks.

Ian.

[Chordmeister]

My experience of applying various noise/colour correction filters etc is that you waste days fiddling about and tweaking with the hundreds of settings and combinations of settings, not being able to decide what looks better and in the end giving up and realising that maybe you like the original ufiltered video better anyway.

[Henk99]

Ian,

I do have to thank you for these links. They are very usefull for me as well.

Thanx!

Henk99

[txpharoah]

The default noise reduction filters in TMPGenc are usually just fine. Also realize MPEG2 naturally cleans up noise during encode.

[IJM]

My experience of applying various noise/colour correction filters etc is that you waste days fiddling about and tweaking with the hundreds of settings and combinations of settings, not being able to decide what looks better and in the end giving up and realising that maybe you like the original ufiltered video better anyway.

True. But it's all part of the learning curve. For me. time isn't too much of a factor, but quality is. That's why I'm happy to let my computer spend hour after hour encoding a DVD MPEG at maximum quality settings (2 pass VBR & Highest Quality Motion Search).

I have a capture I'm looking at right now. It's one of those ex-rental straight-to-video movies that'll never be released on DVD. (If it were, I'd buy the DVD anyway, honest ). Now it doesn't look bad, but it does exhibit typical VHS noise. I could put it straight to DVD, and on the TV it'll look okay, especially from normal viewing distance. But how much bitrate am I going to waste trying to encode the noise as well as the image? What I want to try and do is use some subtle processing to carefully "restore" a little bit of sharpness, smooth out the worst of the noise and just generally enhance it without making it look "processed".

Now I do also have some quite old material that has started to degrade. So, before it gets unrecoverable, I want to capture as much information as I can from this and try to restore some of the image quality. I know it'll never be as good as when it was first recorded, but I hope to get it back to something acceptably watchable.

I also have some material recorded from old analogue satellite. This stuff is okay, but does exhibit some "sparklies" from the original satellite signal. I imagine that these may be difficult to remove; if, indeed, it is at all possible.

These three types of projects represent a wide spectrum of postprocessing challenges. It's going to be interesting.

Ian.

[IJM]

The default noise reduction filters in TMPGenc are usually just fine. Also realize MPEG2 naturally cleans up noise during encode.

Noted. Thanks.

I look forward to your updated guide soon too.

Cheers.

Ian.

[rob1]

Nifty links- thanks. Seems you've already discovered 2 of the 3 main approaches I know of:

1. Use Tmpgnec's internal filters. Pros: easy; Cons: slow as hell and not as many options as the other two.

2. VirtualDub filters, frameserve to the encoder of choice. Pros: a million options, relatively easy, faster than option 1. Cons: really not too many.

3. My personal choice- filter and frameserve via avisynth. Pros: personally, I think this has the most options and flexibility and is the fastest approach. Cons: a steeper learning curve than the other two.

Avisynth uses text files for filtering. You create a script, save the text file with an .avs extension (when you save in notepad or whatever, be sure to change from 'text file' to 'all types' or whatever). If you want to get a feel for what different filters do, you can open the .avs file in virtual dub and take a peak at the result. There's also avsgenie that allows you to play with filters a bit easier. I haven't used it, but someone recommended it to me (link)

Link to avisynth
Link to Doom9 forum- a handy avisynth forum can be found here

And this is what a basic script I use to clean up vhs sources looks like- like I say, it's just a text file. Note- there are about a million ways to approach this in avisynth, you just have to play with it and figure out what works for you and your particular source:

AVISource("e:\08a.avi").ConvertToYUY2(interlaced=t rue)
clip1=Trim(102,589)
clip2=Trim(594,3541)
clip3=Trim(3563,4140)
clip1++clip2++clip3
SeparateFields()
e = SelectEven().UnDot().PeachSmoother().Tweak(sat=1.4 )
o = SelectOdd().UnDot().PeachSmoother().Tweak(sat=1.4)
Interleave(e,o)
Weave()
BicubicResize(352,480)
BorderControl(YBB=8,YTB=8)
TemporalCleaner(ythresh=6,cthresh=8)

Personally, if you're going to spend all of the time it takes to capture and convert a VHS source, I definitely think it's worth the added effort to clean it up a bit.