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  1. I managed to get an unopened VHS of the original Monte Walsh from 1970. It has never been released on DVD. It's put out on the CBS Fox label and it seems to me that these are budget priced tapes, or at least after thought tapes for the rental market.
    There is no mold or odor and the cassette housing and tape inside seem to be pristine.
    However, it looks like crap when played. I have tried it on my 37inch LCD as well as a 14inch CRT set and it looks like crap too.
    The tape is recorded in SP mode from the factory and yet it looks like a 2nd generation recording to me. Grainey, blurry and a little too hot in the lighter areas. I have tried it on both a Toshiba and Panasonic VCR; same results. I don't have any hi-end or editing VCRs, though I do have a Sony SLV-920HF that I hate.

    I am including a 10sec. scene and a still frame in this message.



    10 Sec scene:
    http://www.zumodrive.com/share/6JNwZjFmZG

    At present I have captured it with a Hauppauge HVR-1950 running the source first into a AVT-8710.
    If I need to I am pretty sure I can still capture this using a JVC DVC cam I can hook into the computer's firewire port to save it to a less compressed format than MPG2.

    Thanks for your time.

    --dES
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    "You can observe a lot by watching." - Yogi Bera
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  2. Member vhelp's Avatar
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    I don't think its about "any way to clean" but rather, is more to do with your capture card and equip and setup of things.

    I saw the clip earlier--i asked a friend to d/l it for me. It looks like your capture card was filtering the capture. I could see artifacts steming from some kind of temporal noise reduction filter.

    For vhs material you will want to go lossless, and to be frank, uncompress method is actually too much in most cases, lossless with intermediates huffy or lagarith would be more than enough to capture all the detail without artifacts, except those that may originate from the source material and hardware playing devices, etc.

    So, when capturing vhs, you want to leave the vcr in its raw-est setting possible unless it has a really good NR system. Only you can determine that, if you system has those features. And, as I mentioned, you want to incorporate lossless captures. I would suggest huffy first because it is the least likely to give problems, slightly larget than lagarith but good speed/efficiency all around.

    If you can't get your HVR-1950 to work in lossless mode through proper driver setup then you may want to consider getting a ATI-650/750 pci or usb version, or the hauppauge HVR-2250 (my kind of card) and D/L their latest driver. The 2250 is an easy card to pick up these days now that best buy is carying them along side the HVR-1600 (which, don't get! or else) but you will prob have to look in the back of the hvr-1600 stock because they like to hide them that way--go figure.

    And, don't be put off by usb-2 capture cards, they do work, as long as you incorporate one of the lossless codec, huffy or lagarith, you'll get trouble-free captures. No dropped frames, etc. Some months back or so, I demonstrated and posted a couple of test captures through ubs-2 using the Pinnacle PCTV pro hd stick. It was the one that came with the A/V dong connector for analog captures. The little tight did a great job. You can see the demos for yourself in this link here. Worth a looksee if you don't believe usb-2 can tough it out with the best (pci/pci-e) in this area of capturing video. Those are h264 (avc) encodes.

    But, if you use a dvcam, (dv) then you will need to adjust the black level on that to match more or less closer to the original theatrical spec. Because it will be dv, the levels will be on the bright side. So, you can use some of the ideas in this discussion. There is an avisynth script example that was used on the dv source that brought the levels closer to the original entended spec. I think the example started around here I think, good stuff if your source is comming from dvcam passthrough, but know that those ideas are based on avisynth scripting. The latest avisynth version is 2.58 i think. That is the ver I am currently using in my video projects. But best place to start with for color space correction and film storation work (30i->24p) for instance.

    Now, if you want to go MPEG-2, then I would recommend CBR encode at 9000 bitrate.

    Also, since this if film, it is prob telecined, so you would benefit by incorporating a good IVTC application into the process to restore back to 24p, etc. etc. Then, you can do further noise reduction applications if you are up to that task.

    -vhelp 5412
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  3. Member 2Bdecided's Avatar
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    Originally Posted by vhelp View Post
    For vhs material you will want to go lossless, and to be frank, uncompress method is actually too much in most cases, lossless with intermediates huffy or lagarith would be more than enough to capture all the detail without artifacts, except those that may originate from the source material and hardware playing devices, etc.
    ?!?!?!"?!?!?!?!?

    Lossless is lossless! Uncompressed, HuffYUV, and Largarith will give you exactly identical pixels stored on your HDD - the latter two just require slightly less space, just like ZIP.

    Cheers,
    David.
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    Originally Posted by 2Bdecided View Post
    Originally Posted by vhelp View Post
    For vhs material you will want to go lossless, and to be frank, uncompress method is actually too much in most cases, lossless with intermediates huffy or lagarith would be more than enough to capture all the detail without artifacts, except those that may originate from the source material and hardware playing devices, etc.
    ?!?!?!"?!?!?!?!?

    Lossless is lossless! Uncompressed, HuffYUV, and Largarith will give you exactly identical pixels stored on your HDD - the latter two just require slightly less space, just like ZIP.

    Cheers,
    David.
    ummm...that's exactly what he said.
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  5. Thanks for the advice Vhelp. I hadn't thought of capturing the video with Virtual Dub through the hvr-1950, I had only been using the WinTv software which is mpeg2 only.

    The HVR-1950 is a usb2 capture device. Works well, but until now I haven't really invested any time into it.

    A lot of the junk you see in the sample file is also how the tape looks playing directly from VCR to TV. The mpeg2 sample is captured CBR at 8000 bitrate. The crappiness of the original video is what I am hoping to reel in.

    I did manage to get my hands on a Panasonic AG-1960 last night. This doesn't have any of the good and fancy stuff of the later models, but the playback is actually cleaner than with my other VCRs.

    Will have to play around some more with hardware and then filtering in Vdub.

    --dES
    "You can observe a lot by watching." - Yogi Bera
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  6. Member 2Bdecided's Avatar
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    Originally Posted by greymalkin View Post
    ummm...that's exactly what he said.
    If that's how you read it, that's great. I didn't want anyone to think that uncompressed had even the potential to be better than Huffy or Lags (which is how I read "uncompress method is actually too much in most cases" and "huffy or lagarith would be more than enough"). I apologise for being paranoid. I come from an audio world where some idiots claim that lossless isn't really lossless!

    Cheers,
    David.
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  7. aBigMeanie aedipuss's Avatar
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    Originally Posted by 2Bdecided View Post
    Originally Posted by greymalkin View Post
    ummm...that's exactly what he said.
    If that's how you read it, that's great. I didn't want anyone to think that uncompressed had even the potential to be better than Huffy or Lags (which is how I read "uncompress method is actually too much in most cases" and "huffy or lagarith would be more than enough"). I apologise for being paranoid. I come from an audio world where some idiots claim that lossless isn't really lossless!

    Cheers,
    David.

    you must be fairly young. even pcm wav is lossy.
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    yeah you're right about the "audiophiles"...I don't think "golden eyes syndrome" is quite as bad .
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