Want advice on Vdub filters to apply to this video

[shaynew]

I shot a concert video on analog 8mm and captured it with ADVC-100 and SCLive.

The video quality is pretty bad though, especially after authoring to 8000CBR MPEG2.

Below is a screenshot from Vdub the jpeg compression adds some blur but it wasn't really sharp to begin with.

I think the video camera's autofocus really didn't like the bright white stage lights when lots of other stuff was darker. At times the autofocus kept randomly refocusing a little bit too.

So what can I do to help to sharpen this up and ligthen the dark areas with free vdub filters? Please give URL for any filters not built into vdub.

The DV AVI this still is from will ultimately be going MF2 and authored for DVD.

--Shayne



You can get the BMP version of this at

http://www.towson.edu/~sweyker/Spott-still.bmp

[BJ_M]

http://neuron2.net/flaxen/flaxen.html flaXen VHS Filter 1.0 works pretty good

you can get a big list of filters and download them here http://neuron2.net/

Optimized 2D Cleaner you may want to try also .. or Smart Smoother High Quality

then apply a sharpen filter and video level

[SatStorm]

You don't say if you are PAL or NTSC...
Anyway

Try those filters:

Temporal Smoother @ 5: This gonna help a lot on static areas, smoothing, however it won't help at all the faces of those singing. But it is a start

Dynamic Noise Reduction: Well, if you use Temporal Smoother before, you don't need this go beyond 6. Try it, I suspect it won't make a difference for this kind of noise

Static Noise Reduction: Okey, this gonna help a bit with the faces of the artists, but also gonna blur a bit the picture. I belive is better than using 2D Cleaner for real video (no animation I mean). With a compo of the Sharpen filter, it might disapear some noise...

If you use NTSC you need to adjust colours, luminance, etc: Follow the virtualdub guides for this. Some people concern all this filtering, but it is simply correction of NTSC faults. With PAL you don't have to do those corrections

After this, a good start is like: (keep the order I suggest you):

Alternative 1:

rmPAL (only if you are PAL, for NTSC skip this)
Static Noise Reduction (interlace, 16)
Sharpness (18 )
Temporal Smoother (5 or 6 - don't go beyond!)
Then, try also Video DeNoise filter. Sometimes, it helps with noise exactly like this in your tape.

Alternative 2:
rmPAL (only if you are PAL, for NTSC skip this)
flaXen VHS Filter 1.0
Temporal Smoother (3 - 5 don't go beyond!)


OR:
You learn avisynth and you search for avisynth solutions. There are ready scripts excellent for this!.