(VHS to DVD) AVI filtering vs. straight MPEG; Post your comparisons

[darito]

I'm transferring 12 home-made, 20 year-old, decent shape, VHS-C tapes recorded at SP speed. I want the best archive possible.

I've been doing a lot research in this site and I gather that it's generally recommended to capture in AVI (losless or DV AVI) so that one can filter the video before encoding to MPEG and then burn the DVD. This is based on the assumption that one would have to filter the video to make it look better and filter noise as opposed to capturing directly in MPEG which would result in a worse looking video and losing much more data.

Now, I'm new to all this and when I compare the playback of the original tape and the DVD copy of that tape on my 40" LCD TV I don't notice a difference.

The tape was dubbed to DVD on a new VCR/DVD recorder combo (Toshiba D-VR7) at XP (highest quality availble). This machine encodes in MPEG (according to the manual).

So I play the original tape, press stop, then press play on the DVD player side, see the same video dubbed and can't tell a difference.

Is it just me? I would like to know if anyone would be kind enough to post a comparisson video (even a few seconds) or still captures to show me what difference AVI+filtering vs. straight-to-MPEG really makes on VHS. I would like to know if it's worth getting the extra gear and all the hassles. Maybe I don't have a trained eye or my large TV is crap so I can't really tell.

People talk a lot about the difference it makes, and I'm sure that if you're a pro then it obviously does, I've seen a nice video comparisson lordsmurf did with a beat-up tape, but I never got to see how much it would improve on a tape in fairly decent shape.

Thanks

[edDV]

Key issue is you capped at max bitrate* (aka one hour mode). That can be enough. All good.

Beyond that you can do TBC + higher bit rate on a capture card.

These issues mostly relate to the quality of the source as relates to result.


* most others are trying to cap long telecined movies at lower bit rates.

[themaster1]

Ok here is some work for you darito

You download AvspMod, avisynth 2.6, ffdshow (google and videohelp are your friends)

In one tab you put this script:
avisource=("myvideo.avi") # change video path accordingly
Y = GreyScale()
U = UtoY()
V = VtoY()
StackHorizontal(Y, StackVertical(U,V))


In the the other:
DirectShowSource("Myvideo.mpg",FPS=29.970, ConvertFPS=false) # change video path accordingly
Y = GreyScale()
U = UtoY()
V = VtoY()
StackHorizontal(Y, StackVertical(U,V))

Now you can compare the two and report your findings

[darito]

Now you can compare the two and report your findings

At the moment I can't do that. I can't capture AVI because all the hardware I have is the DVD recorder. I can't use any of those programs because I don't have Windows either. I'll figure something out eventually though- and hopefully contribute some captures. In any case, thanks for the script.

[2Bdecided]

Google found this...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4M-TQsNjFE

...but unless there are specific problems with your tapes that need fixing, it's unlikely you'll see such a big improvement.

A TBC reduces wobbles, noise reduction reduces noise(!), and a little shifting and sharpening can help the chroma. But it still looks like VHS. Without care, you can do more harm than good. Especially through too much denoising, which delivers a plastic look.

It's also possible that your DVD recorder already includes a TBC and/or NR when recording from VHS.

If you're happy with the results, be happy. And stay happy by not spending months and $$$ trying to make it 10% better (if you're lucky).

If you're paranoid, post a small sample for the "experts" here to have a look at - it'll be obvious to most people here how close to optimum your current results are. You can cut out a small part of the DVD MPEG without re-encoding by dropping the DVD VOB into DGIndex, moving the crop marks to isolate the part you want to share, and saving the video. Upload the resulting .m2v file to mediafire or similar.

Cheers,
David.

[jagabo]

Film, not VHS. But many of the issues are the same:
http://vimeo.com/2823934
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=144271

[2Bdecided]

I thought about linking to that jagabo, but didn't because I don't think it's fair.

The specific way Fred captures his film (via a machine vision camera without aperture correction) leaves lots of details soft but present in the original captures. These are ideal for sharpening and enhancing through his script. Technically, there's lots of high frequency low amplitude real detail present, which can be boosted.

Whereas, from VHS, there's no real high frequency information at all. It's all completely gone.


I agree that noise and dropouts etc can be somewhat comparable. Colour correction too, if needed. Though film is a better candidate for this than most vintage VHS home movies.

Cheers,
David.

[sanlyn]

Disagree, 2Bdecided. The color response of VHS varies enormously scene by scene. The OP stated in post #1 that he can't see any difference. If that's the case, so be it. Some people see a difference between VHS->MPEG and a cleanup up VHS with correct color grading, levels, at least some light denoising. But some don't. I would (and so would you, I believe ). It depends on the level of quality the owner wants and is willing to do some work for -- and whether they can see the results.

Of course, once a crummy problem tape comes along...well, it's many trips here and to doom9.

No one has posted a "difference" comparison yet from tape. I'll see if I can dig one up.

[jagabo]

I want the best archive possible.

Then you want an S-VHS deck (can they handle VHS-C tapes?) with a line-TBC, a full frame TBC, an analog proc amp, and a capture device that can capture YUY2 and store it with a lossless codec, or at least DV (minimal compression). Those recordings will run about 40 GB/hr (lossless), 13 GB/hr DV, and they comprise your "best possible" archive. Then you start looking at filtering and encoding your video to make "watchable" copies.

All that equipment will cost you several hundred dollars. If you don't want to spend that much look for a DVD recorder that has a line-TBC that works in passthrough mode (you can get them used for less than US$100). Play the tapes on whatever you have and run the signal through the DVD player to fix the time base. If the levels and colors of your source tapes aren't too far off you can capture the output of the DVD recorder with any decent capture device and save as lossless YUY2 or DV.

[sanlyn]

Here's something I'm currently working on, still in progress. It's a combo example of original retail VHS and digital broadcast recorded to same. The tape is OK but some of the later titles were chewed up by a JVC VCR (and guess what I did with the JVC after that!). So I borrowed the titles from a digital broadcast of the same movie that was recorded on VHS at SP. Allo recordings were made via s-video cable.

The opening "Home Video" logo is from the retail tape. I recorded it to a Toshiba RD-XS34 DVD recorder. Then I took the MGM logo and opening titles from VHS and recorded it to the same DVD recorder. The rest of the movie from VHS is on the DVD, but I don't have the entire DVD on the PC now, just the opening titles that I'm working with. Anyway, on my PC this week I'm working with the opening titles only.

TitleE_demo_original.mpg is off the DVD, which was recorded from VHS. This shows typical retail VHS tape noise, typical home tape noise, typical dropouts, spots, flashes, cable transmission noise, and whatnot. It's about 30-secs, 20MB or so. Noise isn't the only problem: there were colors and levels to deal with. This is the way it plays on TV:
http://dc492.4shared.com/download/9MomxLZc/TitleE_demo_original.mpg

TitleE_demo_new.mpg are the new titles. You should be able to see a difference, not just in noise levels but overall stability and better color. I'm still working with the slight projector hop. Not difficult, just haven't got there yet.
http://dc539.4shared.com/download/lPci8McC/TitleE_demo_new.mpg

Sorry, I don't have a video camera. But if your video is on tape of any kind, it has residual tape noise and color problems to some degree.

[darito]

Google found this...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4M-TQsNjFE

I had already seen that video and it's great, but only a fraction of one of my videos have such awful "discolouration" -or whatever you call it- problems.

It's also possible that your DVD recorder already includes a TBC and/or NR when recording from VHS.

My VCR/DVD recorder combo (Toshiba D-VR7), despite being a new model, doesn't state anywhere to have that.

post a small sample for the "experts" here to have a look at

I'll upload a sample from the dubbed DVD this weekend.

Thank you all.

[sanlyn]

It's also possible that your DVD recorder already includes a TBC and/or NR when recording from VHS.

My VCR/DVD recorder combo (Toshiba D-VR7), despite being a new model, doesn't state anywhere to have that.

All major brand DVD recorders have some form of built-in TBC. Those of 5 years ago or so are said to be "better" (I don't know what that means). But they all have TBC's. Even the no-name Magnavox on shelves today has one. Yet, No DVD recorder being sold anywhere has ever had a label on it that says "Hi! You have TBC!"

[Mini-Me]

To me, the most noticeable difference in sanlyn's comparison involved the better levels and color (aside from eliminating the head switching noise at the bottom). However, even large improvements are not always apparent from casual viewing on small screens. If you really want to see the difference, I would suggest interleaving the two videos in Avisynth and flipping back and forth between the frames from each.

sanlyn's tape seemed pretty typical, but where software filtering really shines is its flexibility when dealing with tapes with serious problems. For instance, here is a post where someone showed the difference between a single capture and a complicated median-like process using multiple captures, and here's another. Here is a tape with a nasty corduroy noise pattern, and here is a nicely filtered version. Here is a thread where someone had a terribly noisy video, and here is perhaps the best fix in the thread. Now, if only I could find the horrifically haloed video from a few days ago...

[sanlyn]

Also, Mini-Me, there's an explosion of small dots, hair, cherries, and dropouts all over the tape and broadcast versions. I got all of them except, I think, a couple of little ones. Really irritating watching them on the originals. Especially the yellow dot on the lion's nose and the black blotch in the "Leslie Caron" title.

Those are typical tape problems, not really godawful tape. I do think the OP is more concerned with fairly pristine tapes going to DVD without a lot of repair. Most of the title work was eliminating noise and spots, which are typical, but not major reconstruction. So I didn't post some of the godawful messy crap we all have to deal with. I don't think the OP would go that far.

[darito]

It's also possible that your DVD recorder already includes a TBC and/or NR when recording from VHS.

My VCR/DVD recorder combo (Toshiba D-VR7), despite being a new model, doesn't state anywhere to have that.

All major brand DVD recorders have some form of built-in TBC.

Thanks, I didn't know that. It's just that I've read before in this forum to disregard some claims from manufacturers when they state to have a TBC because almost anyone can claim that and that many don't compare in task/performance with a good stand alone or VCR built-in line or full TBC. The D-VR7 manual doesn't even claim to have one, so I just pointed that out to 2Bdecided.

[/QUOTE] But let me understand your claim. You're saying that you would gain nothing through post-processing or cleanup of captured video in a suitable format such as AVI, compared with direct recording from tape to MPEG. [/QUOTE] No, and even more now that I've seen your restoration and the ones Mini-Me referred to. My main observation was that, after reading everywhere that capturing VHS directly in MPEG degrades video quality when compared to capturing in AVI then filtering then encoding to MPEG, I did not notice a difference when playing the original tape and comparing the dubbed DVD. So my first point was that I, as an inexperienced layman, could not notice any type of degradation in the directly MPEG-encoded DVD copy. So I did not understand why people here stress so much the importance of AVI and filtering before encoding, specially after seeing over and over the "garbage in, garbage out" concept. So, I was just curious of what people accomplished with restoring with that method but never had seen a comparison of results of both methods. All this to figure out if it's worth it for me to keep researching and learning to make a decent job of capturing my tapes.

[/QUOTE] BTW, earlier I posted a sample of video recorded to DVD, and the same video post-processed later and re-rendered. Are you saying you see no difference between the two versions? [/QUOTE] I just saw those videos and I was very impressed. I had already seen some stills of that work in another thread and remember seeing the cherries and strawberries. But the final video it's quite impressive, really looks pro. I noticed the difference in noise, colour, dots and hairs, but specially on the truly black background (I hate grey blacks!) and even more on the rock solid stable image. I don't get why people who get paid for remastering films can't accomplish that. So thanks for posting them.

I was looking for free software (I've never used video editing software) to cut MPEG for Mac and I found Avidemux, Bigasoft iMovie Converter, MovieConverter Studio. What kind do you recommend? I know that some may degrade quality.

[Mini-Me]

I should mention that PC capture is not just about the opportunity for up-front filtering but the opportunity for preservation: For instance, I'm capturing home movies, and I plan for them to last for years after DVD is long extinct. Therefore, DVD is not really my only end target, and I'd prefer to have digital captures that haven't gone through significantly lossy MPEG-2 compression, so I can encode to H.264 and other future formats...which are likely to be played on larger and larger screens. I have a 65" TV today. Twenty years from now, who knows what kind of ridiculously large screens we'll be viewing our movies on?

If I were only intending to make DVD's, I would be more tempted to go with a hardware encoder...but to be honest, I still might not. Realtime MPEG-2 encoding entails more compression artifacts than picking your favorite software encoder and letting it run for as long as it takes to find the best motion vectors. In the past, I wouldn't have noticed these artifacts at all...but the longer you deal with video and the better you get at recognizing them. My standards for quality have continually risen, and I've learned that what looks okay to me today may not look okay to me tomorrow...so I try to keep that in mind nowadays.

Going down the perfectionist road is very stressful, time-consuming, and expensive though...so I won't blame anyone for settling for whatever is most convenient!

[sanlyn]

I was looking for free software (I've never used video editing software) to cut MPEG for Mac and I found Avidemux, Bigasoft iMovie Converter, MovieConverter Studio. What kind do you recommend? I know that some may degrade quality.

AVidemux. No quality loss -- you won;'t be "processing", you just cut and copy.

The Avidemux main page is here: http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/ Doesn't say much, though.
The download page is here: http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/download.html

Create a folder for Avidemux and download the installer for your particular system. It's convenient to keep the installer there, and any other guides you come across if you want to use the app in the future.

Installs pretty fast. Take the defaults, unless you need Italian or something. It will put an icon on your desktop... or just go to the programs start menu for Avidemux when you're ready to run it. But first , before you run it . . .

It's easier if you just copy a piece of your DVD to a folder on your hard drive. Make a new folder, call it whatever you want. Then get one of your DVD's and put the disk in your DVD drive. Windows will try to play it, but you won't have to. Use either My Computer or Windows Explorer to look into the drive where you mounted your DVD disc. On the disk you'll see a VIDEO_TS folder. Inside that folder are some VOB's. If it's a full movie, there will be some VOB's that are about 1-GB in size, maybe one a little smaller. Just copy any one (or as many as you want) of those VOB's into the folder you just created. Never fear: Avidemux can read VOB's.

After you copy whatever VOB you want into that folder, start Avidemux. Here's a picture of the interface (I have already loaded a video into this one. When you first run your new install, the video area is empty).



Nothing too complicated here. You just want to load an MPEG (VOB) video, cut out part of it, and copy that part to your folder. Then you can post it here. The forum takes something like 11-MB, or maybe it's 13. 11-MB will get you about 9 or 10 seconds of MPEG2.

In Avidemux you open a file just ike opening any file in any other Windows program. In the form's top-left menu, click "File . . . Open . . ." Navigate to your folder of VOBs and select one. When the file is loading, Avidemux will give you a message that says something like, "This looks like an MPG. Do you want to index it?" Answer yes or OK. Indexing takes about 5 minutes, but makes navigation much faster.

When Avidemux has finished indexing, you'll see an interface like the image above. It'll have a different video, of course. On the left-hand side of the dialog window you'll see 3 areas labeled "Video", "Audio", and "Format".

For "Video" select "Copy". You won't need any other procedure. A copy is all you want.
For "Audio", go ahead and say "Copy" (you only live once).
For "Format", click on the down arrow, and from the menu list select "MPEG video".

So much for the commands. You can see below the video frame that there is a horizontal slider to navigate your way through the movie. Slide ahead and find something you want to cut out. In the middle-bottom of the Avidemux window you'll see two small boxes. One box has a red "A", and to its right is a box with a "B". "A" is where you want to start your cut, "B:" is where you want to end it. The arrow buttons to left work like VCR buttons, frame-by-frame, fast forward, backward, etc. Make note of the "Time" numbers just left of bottom-center; that will help you keep track of where you start and end your cut.

Find where you want to start your cut, then click "A". Then scroll or slide forward until you find where you want to cut, and click the "B" button. On the bottom right you'll see your start frame and end frame listed.

To save this copy, click on "File . . .Save . . .Save Video". Navigate to the folder where you want to save the copy (Avidemux will probably default to the folder where you got your VOB). Give the copy a name (be sure to put ".mpeg" on the end of the name). Then click OK. It will copy quickly. If you want, you can save the project before you leave. But you'll note later than an .idx file (the original index that you spent 5 minutes on) has been created in the VOB's folder.

That's it. Done!

[2Bdecided]

there's an explosion of small dots, hair, cherries, and dropouts all over the tape and broadcast versions.

None of which are going to be found on a half-decent VHS-C home movie.

Cheers,
David.

[2Bdecided]

sanlyn's tape seemed pretty typical, but where software filtering really shines is its flexibility when dealing with tapes with serious problems. For instance, here is a post where someone showed the difference between a single capture and a complicated median-like process using multiple captures, and here's another. Here is a tape with a nasty corduroy noise pattern, and here is a nicely filtered version. Here is a thread where someone had a terribly noisy video, and here is perhaps the best fix in the thread. Now, if only I could find the horrifically haloed video from a few days ago...

...a nice summary, but again, none of which are going to be found on a half-decent VHS-C home movie!

Cheers,
David.

[Mini-Me]

sanlyn's tape seemed pretty typical, but where software filtering really shines is its flexibility when dealing with tapes with serious problems. For instance, here is a post where someone showed the difference between a single capture and a complicated median-like process using multiple captures, and here's another. Here is a tape with a nasty corduroy noise pattern, and here is a nicely filtered version. Here is a thread where someone had a terribly noisy video, and here is perhaps the best fix in the thread. Now, if only I could find the horrifically haloed video from a few days ago...

...a nice summary, but again, none of which are going to be found on a half-decent VHS-C home movie!

Cheers,
David.

That's not true in my experience...in fact, those kinds of issues came to mind specifically because I deal almost exclusively with VHS and VHS-C camcorder tapes. I've actually found medians quite useful for my VHS-C movies, because there are frequently frames that are poorly tracked in one capture (i.e. totally wrecked) but tracked well in others. My tapes can have some pretty bad noise in scenes with lower exposure (not as bad as the example given, but still distracting), and noise often depends less on the format and more on the particular camera that was used. I also have tapes from another camera which display an odd, relatively static noise pattern; it's different from the corduroy pattern I mentioned above, but similar concepts apply.

[sanlyn]

2B, you must be pre-filtering your captures somehow. Relatives give me VHS, webcam, VHS-C, pro-made barmitzvah tapes, wedding tapes, communion tapes, graduation videos -- they all have those problems to some degree. Anything on tape has a residual noise level. If they don't come with the tape, video and audio heads will put 'em there. Agreed, the sample I used had a case of pimples, but that was for demo. Aside from dots and blobs, there was other noise.

[2Bdecided]

With home movies, of course I have sensor noise in low light, and a little tape noise in all footage. The chroma is soft and shifted down by a line or two.

But it's nothing dramatic. It's not anything that most people will even notice once they're engrossed in the content.

(Though it's a little optimistic to expect anyone, even the people in them, to get engrossed watching home movies for more than a couple of minutes. Unless you shot them very well in the first place, and edit them exceptionally well now.)

My point is simply that the dramatic improvements brought about by VideoFred's 8mm film restoration script on his own 8mm film captures, and the dramatic improvements that AVIsynth can bring when fixing certain specific nasty problems, are completely unrepresentative of what you can do with first generation home movies IME. VHS home movies will always look like VHS home movies.

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=136373&highlight=PAL+s-vhs+script

..and subjectively, in motion, it sometimes looks better with the noise still there! Though it's far easier to encode (DVD or YouTube) with the noise reduced/removed.

Cheers,
David.

[sanlyn]

Agreed, videoFred's source was something I'd rather avoid. I chose my sample because it was part old-aged retail and part typical-cable junk noise, the kind of video many people would own or record themselves. I think if the O.P. had a really messy tape, it would often be difficult to tell the difference between the original mess and the direct-recording mess -- they'd both look like the same mess. A trained eye would say the recoirded mess had more problems than the original, but most people don't look that closely.

I do have transfers from nicely kept VHS. One could say they didn't need cleanup before they were encoded, but I could see some effects effects I would rather have done without. Those tapes looked decent to begin with; there was precious little I needed to do to spiff 'em up a bit for a better archive. But to say there's "no difference" -- well, that's a matter of preference with decent originals. I can tell the difference, many people can't. VideoFred, well, that's a different story. Anyone who can't see a difference with that material would have no interest in a cleanup anyway.

[Mini-Me]

The severity of noise depends on your camera: The VHS movies from one of my camcorders aren't too bad in terms of noise. The VHS-C movies from another camcorder have very ugly, blotchy, medium-frequency chroma noise and "mist" in low light. It's distracting, and it needs to be dealt with. Using a VCR with heavy DNR fixes that, but it comes at a high cost in terms of detail and temporal artifacts.

Then again, my other camera has a "noise pattern" that appears to look like scanlines 2 lines high (so there are 2 lighter lines followed by 2 darker lines). As it turns out, within each interlaced field, every odd/even line was recorded with different levels. The difference is nonlinear too, so it requires the odd/even lines of each field to be histogram-matched to the whole field. This eliminates the pattern entirely without blurring.

It's also difficult to set proper levels without a software histogram at your disposal...and without PC capture, you generally need a proc amp to alter levels at all. Medians are similarly indispensible to me, since it's rare to capture a video without any poorly tracked sections (often due to dust particles, etc.). I intend on eventually fixing every bit of vertical jitter...as well as haloing. Those are both pretty tall orders, but I'm determined. Some halos come from my VCR's, and some of the black ones are baked into the tape. No existing filter cleans them to my satisfaction, but I've done enough work towards one to know it's possible. Long story short, there's no substitute for software filtering for me.

Moreover, a lot of this depends on your end target: If you're targeting DVD copies of broadcast recordings, it's probably not worth the effort. If the tapes are important to you though, you might not be targeting a dying format like DVD in the first place. I'm much more comfortable having nearly lossless files that I can back up then filter/reencode as I please. Once you go far enough to get PC capture working appropriately (difficult), filtering is just a hop, skip, and a jump away...and it's much more fun and less stressful than the actual capture process.

As a final note, I don't think anyone but the owner of the tapes can fairly make a judgment on how precious they are, or how much people may be interested in watching them. Every family has its own micro-culture, and some families will be more interested in watching old home movies than others. Mine has a small obsession. It may also depend on the kind of tapes that were made: I've found that my home movies of special occasions (birthdays, Christmases, etc.) are usually pretty dull throughout (with a few worthwhile moments), but the times my mom randomly sat down and recorded my little sisters talking with her are much more rewatchable.

[darito]

sanlyn, thanks for the instructions for installing Avidemux. Last weekend I got to cut 30 seconds and tried to upload it but it took forever; I ended up uploading 10 seconds only. I had to format in MPEG-PV (A+V) because by formatting in MPEG Video would not record sound.

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=136373&highlight=PAL+s-vhs+script

..and subjectively, in motion, it sometimes looks better with the noise still there! Though it's far easier to encode (DVD or YouTube) with the noise reduced/removed.

That comparison is great!

Now, I'm not sure what I'm gonna do with mines. To be frank, I'm just grateful I have found them before they got lost or deteriorated. If I restore them or get t do any filtering it will be mostly for fun or to learn something new. But feel free to let me know your thoughts about my video and what you would do to it.

I chose this section because it's probably the worse I could find. It has a lot of vertical jitter (maybe cause it's right at the beginning of the tape), noise, and more. The rest of the videos are generally better, but with about same or a little less noise.

http://files.videohelp.com/u/210662/short%20ps%20av.mpeg

[darito]

By the way, I've tried inserting the video directly but the uploading takes an eternity and it doesn't even show a progress bar so I had to upload it to my profile which does provide a progress bar. If any site administrators are reading this, it would be nice to add a progress bar to the upload window, otherwise it's kind of hard to tell if the file is actually uploading at all and it's pretty frustrating.

[2Bdecided]

If you wanted, you could really improve that in AVIsynth.

If you can't prevent the jumps when capturing, something like stab() should take care of them in AVIsynth.

The flicker can be removed too, though I wouldn't know how. Some threads on doom9 about it.

Cheers,
David.

[2Bdecided]

@mini-me - yes, I've had two camcorders with very specific "noise patterns" - I've always assumed that the blotches are left from the result of debayering low light images.

I've not found a satisfactory solution to this. Both Neat Video and CamcorderColourDenoise can remove them, but only by removing most of the wanted colour information too.

Cheers,
David.

[sanlyn]

RE: uploaded MPEG:

Actually a decent shot despite horrible lighting that should be avoided -- but how many people carry fill lights around with their camera ??. Could use some chroma smoothing, and levels are out of spec, which results in lost detail in many shadow and highlight areas. What's being recorded is interlaced playback and YV12 converting blacks and whites to Rec601. When the DVD recording is played back, that conversion is repeated again; the darks and brights are stretched again in the playback process, and the final result is more contrasty than the original in-camera video -- especially with this lighting.

There are ripples and white streaks all over the place. Here are images of two of them, extracted from frames and blown up 2X with bicubic resize. I forget which frame the first image is from, but the lower "streak40" is from frame 40. That streak is easy to see and goes all the way across the frame. Some of the streaks are on even fields only, some odd only, some on both. These images are from interlaced frames. In frame 40, there are two of the same streak in the odd (bottom) field. Many of them could be fixed in AVI.


[Attachment 11669 - Click to enlarge]


[Attachment 11670 - Click to enlarge]

This is interlaced video. An interlaced video frame consists of two fields; each field is from a different moment in time. The fields are arranged in this video as top field first (TFF). If you separate those fields and view them one at a time in succession, you'll see an object moving from left to right or right to left within the same frame. When you separate the fields they will be half the vertical size of your 720x480 frame (each field will be 720x240, not 720x480). Separated, the fields from frame 4 look like this (frame count starts at 0):


[Attachment 11671 - Click to enlarge]

In the above images, the difference in the brightness of the highlights is difficult to see in still images. But when viewed field-by-field, the top field is a little darker than the bottom field. Which brings us to the subject of the flicker......

The flicker is brightest on every 3rd field (that's field, not frame). I think the flicker is coming from that light over the stove, because darker objects that are out of the light's path don't flicker. The flicker is also less evident the farther away things are from that light. If you look at the light of the sky outside the window in the background, you'll see that it doesn't flicker.

The flutter (up and down movement) sometimes happens on individual fields: that is, the flutter is often a "hop" that occurs only on odd or even fields, not on the whole frame. A jitter filter wouldn't fix these unless you separate fields to process it. You wouldn't call it flutter or jitter exactly, it's really "field hopping". But sometimes the whole frame hops (both fields).

My guess is that your computer doesn't have many plugins installed such as DGIndex, yadif, lossless compressors like huffyuv or lagarith, etc. I used DGindex to open this as an AVI in Avisynth and used yadif to deinterlace it into individual fields. Yadif deinterlaces the video (which will double the number of frames and double the playback speed), and resizes 720x240 fields to full-frame 720x480; yadif is programmed to avoid resizing artifacts from the resize. The result is an AVI that plays fields (not frames) that look the way those fields look when they are played and expanded on TV. But the resulting uncompressed AVI was 624 frames (fields, really) and 206-MB file size with Lagarith lossless compression. That's inconvenient for download, but I could mount on a free download site if you want.

You know what, folks? I don't know if (or how) VirtualDub works in a Mac. If anyone does, they might volunteer info on how darito can use separatefields() and bob() or yadif and other goodies in a Mac.

[darito]

There are ripples and white streaks all over the place.

Is that caused and "baked" into the tape by the original camera?

I think the flicker is coming from that light over the stove.

It is. It's one of those annoying long tube lights.

The flutter (up and down movement)

Is that caused by the camera as well? Like I said before, flutter is not that bad in the rest of the tape. This capture it's from the beginning of the tape and I also noticed this kind of flutter and/or skipping of frames (as if fractions of footage were cut from the capture) in another tape right at the beginning.

I have another VCR (JVC HR-S9800U) that I'm going to use to test with different configurations to see what difference it makes on the same footage. Do you think the Dynamic Drum function would work or be appropriate to fix this type of flutter? I know that this function deactivates the TBC/NR though.

As per the software suggestions, I think I'm going to wait because I'll probably buy a used DV camcorder for various reasons. 1st I can directly create a high quality back-up archive of the VHS tapes in the DV tapes. 2nd I can hook it up to my brother's Macbook Pro which has firewire port, use is as a pass-through and then maybe get to learn to use Virtualdub, AVIsynth and all the neat tools you mentioned to enhance the footage. 3rd I know some camcorders have additional features like TBC and DNR (although my JVC VCR already has that). 4th When I'm done I can resell it for about the same price I buy it or even keep it as a camcorder!

Any suggestions about what camcorder to get?