Truly awful quality VHS - need hints for best cleanup software to =>dvd

[Wills]

Hi there,

Many years ago in my teens I took several dozen hours of footage on my dad's Sony Hi8 shoulder mounted video camera. I copied all footage onto VHS and then re-used the camera tapes (generational quality loss not being big on my 13 year old agenda. Damn).

Now we have 7 or 8 VHS tapes which I want to put onto DVD. Some of the footage is ok, it's viewable. Mostly, with this camera, if what I was shooting was inside and at night, forget it. (Unless my parents allowed me to use the 'passive' floodlight we got - which always started smoking after 5 mins of use and generally scorched everyone in the room's retinas).

Taking the VHS feed through my composite video line-in on my TV capture card is no problem. I could even use my copy of Pinnacle Studio Pro to dump it as very very large uncompressed avi containers.

However, before encoding it to DVD I want to try and clean it up - at least the sections that are really pretty dark and gloomy. It occurs to me that a really good video editing software package would be able to do the equivalent of a photo gamma correction edit but to moving video......

my question is - what package? Premiere Pro 2 ? Wait for Pro 3? Other software? And should I be looking for a gamma correction filter? Or is it called something else for video?

Suggestions please!

Many TIA.

[lordsmurf]

You need to do most filtering at the hardware level. BY the time it hits software, it's too late, you've digitized the errors. With only 7-8 tapes, I'd consider paying for a service to fix them.

Maybe see what VirtualDub can do for you. Or even TMPGEnc. There is no need for an NLE, those are meant for editing, not cleaning up quality.

[guns1inger]

Avisynth is another tool that has many filters available for it, however it is scripted (has no GUI front end) and takes a little bit of effort up front to get used to. Once you do, however, it far surpasses anything virtualdub can do.

[redwudz]

Moving to our Restoration Forum.

[Soopafresh]

There's a plugin for Avisynth called Hdragc which will bring out the brightness without blowing out the highlights as traditional apps can do. You should post a ten second clip of some problematic video and we can help you with the settings.

See examples on this page:
http://strony.aster.pl/paviko/hdragc.htm

[Wills]

Hi all,

Thanks for your kind replies.
I know sending them to a service might be the best option but with the number of hours that we're talking about, it's going to be hideously expensive. I'd rather try my best with the wildly over-powerful hardware my friendly WinTel corporation has made me buy.....if my results are rubbish I might pay for a service.

I'll post 10 seconds of some problematic video when I actually get round to capping it (could take some time - got a 1 month old baby next door).

I would have throught that Premiere might have some sort of plugin for this, but if you tell me AviSynth can do it, I'll go down that route.

A side bar - for the actual capping of the video, what's the best software to use? I can bring it into my Pinnacle Studio Pro 10, and then save it as uncompressed DV format which will be huge (got many hundreds of gigs free). Or should I use Premiere? Or something else? And lastly, what's the video equivalent of TIF format (uncompressed, I suppose, unless there's some LZW lossless compression style format for video (my knowledge is in stills, natch.))

Sorry for so many questions, still a beginner!
Many thanks all.

[edDV]

Hi all,

Thanks for your kind replies.
I know sending them to a service might be the best option but with the number of hours that we're talking about, it's going to be hideously expensive. I'd rather try my best with the wildly over-powerful hardware my friendly WinTel corporation has made me buy.....if my results are rubbish I might pay for a service.

I'll post 10 seconds of some problematic video when I actually get round to capping it (could take some time - got a 1 month old baby next door).

I would have throught that Premiere might have some sort of plugin for this, but if you tell me AviSynth can do it, I'll go down that route.

Many thanks all.

Post a typical frame or very short clip (2MB max) and let us play with it.

[guns1inger]

DV is not uncompressed, but is compressed at approx. a 5:1 ratio. It uses around 13GB per hour of footage. True uncompressed SD takes up a lot more than that. You can look at lossless compression - there are at least 15 different lossless codecs around. Huffyuv and Lagarith are popular around here. They will still use substantially more space than DV though. A VHS cleanup I was working on a while back was just over two hours long, and required just over 59GB when compressed with Lagarith. Huffyuv will be a little larger again.

[Wills]

good god I knew it'd be big but I had no idea it'd be quite that big.
I can handle very very large files - got an absurd number of hdds.

I figured DV wasn't uncompressed, I meant really that DV quality would be ok. But then my source is nothing like as clean.....

This is all looking quite complicated - fun, but complicated. I thought my TV card (Happauge WinTV PVR 150) would show up on the list of capture devices that Pinnacle will accept. But apparently not.

So I guess I'll record it in through the Happauge video software, recorded at as high a quality as the software'll allow. This seems to be DVD....which implies compression. So I wonder if that's good enough. Probably not. Thing is, I don't have much money to throw at this in the way of video capture cards.....

I'll see what kind of results I can get by capping it through Happauge.....and get back to you.

Ta, again,

W

[edDV]

The Hauppauge WinTV PVR 150 captures directly to MPeg2. It won't do DV or uncompressed capture. You would need other devices to do that.

With the PVR-150, use the Hauppauge software to capture an MPeg2 file. Use one of the higher bit rates. Try 8000Kb/s and 12000Kb/s for a test. That MPeg2 file can then be imported to other programs for filtering.

Try your capture in your Pinnacle program, then try VirtualdubMod.

Another program to consider is Womble MPegVCR. It will directly edit your MPeg2 TV captures and tape captures that don't need heavy restoration. http://www.womble.com/products/vcr.html

Start with one of your cleaner tapes first to get the process working and attack the problem tapes later When you understand the tools.

[lordsmurf]

The 150 is not a good choice, the 250 is better. But you really don't want either one for restoring video. You need uncompressed, not MPEG.

Do not ignore VirtualDub.
Do not use Pinnacle anything.

I'm afraid you have the wrong tools for this job. You're impacting errors at least 2-3 times, making it harder than it needs to be.

The VirtualDub MPEG edition might help you. I wouldn't expect much.

This is a hard project to start with. You really cannot fix under- or over-exposures either.

[Wills]

Well, first off, thanks to all of you for your swiftness and clarity. I don't post on many message boards although I use them to get the information I need - usually people either don't read my question or reply with suggestions that I've already said I've tried in the my original post. So I'm rather impressed with this board.

I know that I'm doing everything strictly amateurishly. I don't mind really - my sisters and I just want this stuff off nasty magnetic tapes and onto something we can backup without generational quality loss. I also need to provide them all with copies of the whole thing, and I really don't want to buy a 50 pack of VHS. It would feel very last century....and the number of hours involved totally negates the possibility of getting it done professionally. We have a further 12 large reels of Super 8 Cine film that we're going to have to bite the bullet on and get done professionally that hail from the 70s....which does of course beg the question....just how interesting is that picnic/sports day/amusing haircut? It's not as if they've footage of the grassy knoll on them....(sidebar - while anything but a Luddite, I do rather prefer cine footage - the big screen, darkened room, soundless, friendly, analog smoothing.....modern digital cameras really just give too much.......)

With that in mind, and fully understanding that I would need at the very least to dump the VHS composite data onto my PC in a non-compressed format, how much would we be talking for an entry level video capture card that would allow me to do just that? I don't want to spend much as I've said; and of course these tapes were recorded on long-dead VHS players and thus the domestic machine they'll be played on for capturing won't be providing the best quality the tapes might be able to produce given a professional machine with automatic and precise azimuth alignment....etc etc, it's a vicious circle.

A point towards a £50 PCI capture card would really make my day.....or USB 2 or Firewire? Even better.....
And your collective points and suggestions on VirutalDub and Pinnacle are well taken - will bear them in mind once I've got the hardware capturing side sorted.

Again, thanks for your thoughts.....

[edDV]

Just be aware that what you want to do, although a very typical need, is one of the most difficult things to do in video. VHS is the lowest quality and most variable source. It's similar to extracting music from a noisy phone line.

There is no one "best" way at the consumer level. There are technical reasons why "uncompressed" capture with a $30 card is far from the ideal solution since these cards use very wide bandwidth sampling where VHS recorded luminance is limited to only 3MHz. Hence these cards capture the 3MHz plus all the noise out to >7MHz or wherever the limited digital low pass filter chops high frequencies. Pro capture cards are very expensive due to analog band pass filtering ahead of A/D. A "pro" restoration facility can afford these capture devices + frame synchronizers but a typical consumer probably can't.

Once captured "uncompressed" you then need to use various software digital filtering techniques to extract the desired signal from the captured noise. None of these can duplicate the results of pre A/D analog filtering + time base correction.

Consumer capture devices that encode DV or MPeg rely on various DSP filters built into hardware. The video will be digitized, digital filtered and then encoded all in hardware. You get the results programmed in firmware by the device designer. Often they optimize for TV tuner capture rather than VHS. I have yet to see a VHS mode for these devices.

So the choices are "uncompressed" + software digital filtering or packaged solutions like

DVD Recorders
DV camcorder "pass-through" capture or standalone DV format transcoders
MPeg2 PVR capture devices (PCI or USB2)
Digital VHS recorders
etc.

MPeg2 or MPeg4 capture solutions result in a heavily compressed file. Post filtering will be less successful.

DV format has all frames and less compression so has more potential for post filtering.

Good luck! We are all looking for the best formula.

[SatStorm]

Whatever you choose, If you use virtualdub and not avisyth, I suggest you those amazing MSU filters

http://www.compression.ru/video/public_filters.htm

They have solutions that do miracles with the colours, the brightness, etc.

If you buy a card that do hardware mpeg 2 and you wish to filter, you can use virtualdub mpeg2

[notfie]

For my truly awful VHS I ripped it with virtualdub with huffy codec and used these filters in AVIDemux in final encode.

#PY  <- Needed to identify #
#--automatically built--

adm = Avidemux()
adm.addVideoFilter("crop", "top=0", "bottom=8", "left=0", "right=0")
adm.addVideoFilter("fluxsmooth", "temporal_threshold=2", "spatial_threshold=5")
adm.addVideoFilter("MplayerDenoise3D", "luma=7.000000", "chroma=8.000000", "temporal=6.000000")
adm.addVideoFilter("fluxsmooth", "temporal_threshold=6", "spatial_threshold=3")

You can save that to a file and load it in the filters window.

Edit: Actually it might have been that I ripped it with Lagarith and then converted it to Huffy since Lagarith encodes really fast and avidemux doesn't support lagarith but does support huffy. There shouldn't be any loss of quality or data in converting from lagarith to huffy

[sanlyn]

Deveral ideas posted so far. Confusing to a newcomer, I know. I have to start by going along with lordsmurf:

The 150 is not a good choice, the 250 is better. But you really don't want either one for restoring video. You need uncompressed, not MPEG.

Do not ignore VirtualDub.
Do not use Pinnacle anything.

Sorry, but I cannot agree with SatStorm: the MSU filter set is clunky, used by many to ruin and distort video. They won't help with the tapes as you've decribed them. There are a great many Avisynth and VirtualDub filters that would be more appropriate.

Can't agree with Moftie either. It's a bit early to prescribe particular filters, even if they might work in other projects, because we don't know what your typical videos look like.

Capturing directly to lossy encodes such as MPEG or DV is often the only way many people can afford to get VHS onto a computer. As noted, there are limitations to this method and it's not the "best", but how many can afford to gather up the old analog capture gear that was designed for that purpose? One can cap to very high bitrate MPEG and often it's workable. DV wouldn't be the best choice for VHS, but that's been done as well. VHS color and level problems, damage, dropouts, fading, bad frames, line sync errors, dot crawl, chroma noise, and a host of other errors that characterize old crumby awful noisy VHS are more difficult to fix from lossy encodes, but it has been done. The tapes might not look too bad on TV, especially on a CRT, but digital recording circuits see VHS very very very differently.

Without a sample from your tapes, advice is necessarily very general. You might want to have a look at this website of video and capture guides, where many members here got their start in video. Some of the material might be dated here and there, but the principles remain the same: http://www.digitalfaq.com/guides/video.htm

Browsing some forum posts that deal with capture cleanup and restoration problems, especially threads where scripts and samples are posted, should prove illuminating. Don't be intimated by some of the complicated posts you find here. Everyone has to start somewhere.

[Brad]

Just a necro, sanlyn.