Is this VHS Quality Acceptable?

[cfelicio]

Hi There,

I've been lurking around for many years, since I started my home video conversion project. I read a lot of useful things in these years, and thank you all for sharing such a wonderful amount of knowledge!

Today I present a video that I made which I need some help.

This is an example video (part of many I captured) done with a Consumer Camera (Old JVC from the early 90's). I used a JVC HR-3500U attached to a ATI 550 Card and Virtual VCR to Capture. It is all NTSC Videos, I captured with 720x480 if I remember correctly.

I didn't have enough space by that time to do lossless, so I used MPEG 2 with a 6000kbps bitrate.

Here are the steps I took before posting on youtube:

- Deinterlaced with Yadif on Virtualdub (and file result on huffyuv, since I'm doing one file at a time, so I have enough space)

- Used VReveal "Stabilize" option, Auto Contrast and Auto White Balance.

- Exported to a WMV File with highest quality resulting in a 500mb file for ~10min video.

- Uploaded the WMV File to Youtube


Judging from the video you see, do you think the quality can be improved if:

- I change my workflow?

- Recapture with Lossless and use better VCR (with TBC / DNR / etc)?


I tried to search the forums for some video example of what a video captured with a Home Camera would look like with and without tbc / dnr / etc, but couldn't find any. Just found professional recorded videos (like movies, cartoons, etc).


Can you have a look at my video and tell me if it looks decent, if it has any obvious flaws that can be fixed (besides cropping out the bad times where the video lose sync)?

Also, if you have any home video example captured with and without tbc, can you let me know?


Here is the Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eF3jnvEAAjA

Thanks a lot!

Carlos

[poisondeathray]

acceptable for what ? is the goal youtube ?

youtube kills the quality, so some artifacts maybe youtube's fault. The compression and quality is quite poor here - faces look like "blobs", it's pixellated in parts

some "flaws" that could be improved:

- you can see "buzzing ants" all over the footage this is yadif's fault, but it exacerbated by youtube compression as well. There are better deinterlacers through avisynth

- still seems a bit "unsmooth" to me - you could run it through deshaker or another stabilizer

actually fixing the first 2 above will improve compression on youtube and picture quality

- some chromatic aberration? (blue-purple fringing around edges?) . There are some filters that might be able improve this

[jagabo]

I thought it was way over filtered (no small details left, everything looks like plastic) and you need to look into the blown out brights (use gamma instead of brightness to bring out shadow detail). Deshaking could be better too. Try Gunnar Thalin's Deshaker for VirtualDub. If you want better deinterlacing try QTGMC() in AviSynth.

[budwzr]

The white balance is too cool, but at 6:43 it gets warmer just for a split second, and it looks much better. Was that the original white balance before any filtering?

If you could get back to that, it would help.

[Knightmessenger]

Do you think you could post a screencap of the video before it was uploaded to youtube. That might help us tell whether the digital encoding needs improvement or the source wasn't that good.

First off, was this vhs first generation? (not a copy) It's hard to tell from the youtube video but it looks to me that the video was fairly fuzzy on the capture you got. Maybe you over filtered it and just smeared out detail?

Also, it appears to be 720x480. It should really be 640x480 meaning your video is slightly too fat. I really don't understand the difference because I've been told by others that standard def is never 720p and the only reason an SD video shows up as 720x480 on some computer screens is because of the square pixel aspect ratio or something like that.

But if you can do a screencap of your original file, that would help a lot.

[cfelicio]

Hi All,

Thank you very much for your kind replies and useful information!

Since youtube removes a lot of detail, I posted a sample below in huffyuv format, straight from the capture video without any modifications. I have no experience with avisynth but will look into the suggested deinterlacer filter.

Also, for the chroma noise next to the white clothes, what filter could be used?

Also, is the video sample below good enough material to produce decent results? Would I be better off recapturing with a VCR with TBC, or wouldn't make too much of a difference?



Thanks a lot!
Carlos

[cfelicio]

Adding a screencap

[cici]

yet, the vidoe you made is good. i think you will be more familiar with it after many times operation.

[poisondeathray]

1) what are your format goals ? are you planning this for dvd? if so , you would keep it interlaced (was youtube just for a quick demonstration ? )

2) your "white balance" or whatever your filters used is causing a "cold" or "blue color cast" on the image. I'm assuming the "white" shirts on the musicians was supposed to be "white" ? This also intensifies the blue fringe - I doubt the fringe was solely the fault of whatever filters you used, but I would like to see an unfiltered video. You can also see skin tones are bluish . Sometimes this can be intentional e.g. if you want to convey a certain mood, but it doesn't fit with the concert IMO.

3) there is a bit of chroma noise in the background, this is easily treated with various chroma denoising filters . FFT3DFilter with chroma plane (plane=3) will take care of it

4) the blue fringe (its not really chromatic aberration, which is usually more purplish) might be partially improved by avisynth scripts - either fixchromaticaberration() or mergechroma( awarpsharp2) with some tweaking. If you have access to something like after effects, it will do a nicer job

5) most people would overlay a black border on the lower edge to cover the crud. (or crop out the lower edge and add back black borders)

[cfelicio]

1) what are your format goals ? are you planning this for dvd? if so , you would keep it interlaced (was youtube just for a quick demonstration ? )

2) your "white balance" or whatever your filters used is causing a "cold" or "blue color cast" on the image. I'm assuming the "white" shirts on the musicians was supposed to be "white" ? This also intensifies the blue fringe - I doubt the fringe was solely the fault of whatever filters you used, but I would like to see an unfiltered video. You can also see skin tones are bluish . Sometimes this can be intentional e.g. if you want to convey a certain mood, but it doesn't fit with the concert IMO.

3) there is a bit of chroma noise in the background, this is easily treated with various chroma denoising filters . FFT3DFilter with chroma plane (plane=3) will take care of it

4) the blue fringe (its not really chromatic aberration, which is usually more purplish) might be partially improved by avisynth scripts - either fixchromaticaberration() or mergechroma( awarpsharp2) with some tweaking. If you have access to something like after effects, it will do a nicer job

5) most people would overlay a black border on the lower edge to cover the crud. (or crop out the lower edge and add back black borders)

1 - My setup is a 1080p TV connected to a Windows 7 Media Player PC. So in this case I think it's better to deinterlace (with QTGMC?). The sample provided wasn't filtered, it's straight out of the capture card

2 - I didn't do any white balance adjustment on the sample. Is there any auto balance filter for avisynth?

3 - Awesome, will try that

4 - Will try that

5 - These will go away when I use deshaker or stabilizer since they "zoom" the video

[poisondeathray]

1) well how are you playing it ? all hdtv's can play interlaced signal (they all have deinterlacing capability). There's pros/cons to deinterlacing, but you should always keep a copy of the original for future projects

2) in the 1st post you said you used vreveal and some other stuff ? or was that only for youtube? There are auto white balancing filters in avisynth, but you might want to do it manually ("auto" anything usually give you subpar results IMO) . If you wanted to try it out e.g. ColorYUV(autowhite=true)

You applied no filters, but this sample was RGB Huffyuv. Can you explain what you did to generate it? You started out with MPEG2 correct ?

5) it depends on the deshaker or stabilizer settings. Not all the edge compensation modes will zoom the way you want, and on stable scenes, the crud will creep back in.

[cfelicio]

1) well how are you playing it ? all hdtv's can play interlaced signal (they all have deinterlacing capability). There's pros/cons to deinterlacing, but you should always keep a copy of the original for future projects

2) in the 1st post you said you used vreveal and some other stuff ? or was that only for youtube? There are auto white balancing filters in avisynth, but you might want to do it manually ("auto" anything usually give you subpar results IMO) . If you wanted to try it out e.g. ColorYUV(autowhite=true)

You applied no filters, but this sample was RGB Huffyuv. Can you explain what you did to generate it? You started out with MPEG2 correct ?

5) it depends on the deshaker or stabilizer settings. Not all the edge compensation modes will zoom the way you want, and on stable scenes, the crud will creep back in.

1 - I'm playing using MediaPortal, which can certainly deinterlace, but the htpc has an atom processor and not sure if it can handle the extra effort. I have the original copies backed up interlaced.

2 - The vreveal and other stuff were only on the youtube sample. The one I posted later was just converted from mpeg2 to huffyuv because virtualdub won't let me cut a piece out of the full video on mpeg2. I saved as huffyuv to avoid losing further details due to recompression. I tried to save as YUV but somehow virtualdub is crashing on me, and it worked as RGB. Did I lose some detail on this?

5 - I see. So in this case I might crop as well. But this is easy, the hard part is make it look nice based on all the other factors


So, considering the original sample, do you think it will look nice enough for a VHS capture? Nothing worth of recapturing with a nicer TBC Equipped VCR, or better capture card?

Edit: I will try to start playing with Avisynth with all the suggestions posted here so far and see if I can post a new sample with the changes!

Thanks!
Carlos

[poisondeathray]

for future reference, there are tools that can cut mpeg2 without re-encoding - e.g. mpg2cut2, avidemux (and videoredo, womble dvd wizard are both paid)

IMO the higher quality deinterlacers are better than the expensive HDTV algorithms for deinterlacing. But they are slow.

So, considering the original sample, do you think it will look nice enough for a VHS capture? Nothing worth of recapturing with a nicer TBC Equipped VCR, or better capture card?

I'll defer your last question to other folks , I don't have much experience with VHS transfers. My gut feeling is not much improvement to be had. You don't have much VHS jitter , and the minor post processing for noise can be done just as well or better in post. I didn't see much breaking up , pixellation or stressing the codec in that small sample (but it might not be representative of the other scenes) - If you had more motion or complex scenes then low bitrate MPEG2 might not be enough - This will be dependent on the source content. You said you used 6Mb/s . I would increase it higher just on principle.

But if this is important footage, or high sentimental value then you might want to squeeze every last bit of quality out of it

[cfelicio]

Wow, that's a great tip! Please see another sample from the very original (I used mpg2cut this time as u suggested), with a bit of "zoom" in the orchestra so can see more details

I encoded in YUY2, when using avisynth it will convert to YV12, right? will that cause any color loss?

[jagabo]

The MPG clip is much better and has brights that can be salvaged. I turned the luma gain down a bit in AviSynth then used VirtualDub's Gradation Curves to adjust the colors. It's still not perfect but much improved:

original:


adjusted:


from your youtube FLV:


For making a DVD you should leave the video interlaced. If you're going to perform a lot of filtering like this, and you have to capture as MPEG 2, I would recommend you capture with the highest bitrate the software lets you. Even better would be to capture YUY2 and losslessly compress with HuffYUV. The intermediate files will be big but they will be free of MPEG artifacts.

[2Bdecided]

I think it's quite good, but the levels are too hot, the deinterlacing isn't great, and it's the wrong shape. Resize to 640x480 for YouTube. Or 960x720 (use NNEDI or something to upscale - plenty of upscaling threads at the doom9 forums - it's not that upscaling VHS makes it better - normally it would be silly - but it can force YouTube into throwing less away!).

Just my personal preference, but I wouldn't deshake the bit where the date is burnt into the video - it looks silly to have it bobbing around like that!

It has a kind of cartoonish look, like it's been denoised too much and then oversharpened - but I can't see anything in your workflow that would have done that, unless you have the VCR set to "sharp" or something. WMV can over-smooth things sometimes. I upload as mp4 (which can also oversmooth things sometimes - but there's more control available in decent encoders to avoid this).

Apart from where it drops out entirely, I don't see anything significant that a TBC would help with. Vertical lines aren't too wobbly. They'd probably be even better with a line TBC, but I think you're very lucky with the source already in this respect.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
David.

[lordsmurf]

Jagabo, I think your monitor is off. Mine is calibrated. I've seen 2-3 of your fixes recently, and they tend to be just as off as the original footage. Better, yes, but still quite a ways off. Look into that.

Consider a Spyder: http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2F...reative=390957

A big issue I see in the video is chroma noise.

[jagabo]

I'm not going to spend the time it takes to get more exact results. You're welcome to spend your time getting better results for the OP.

[cfelicio]

Hi All,

Based on the suggestions so far, what I'm going to try tonight is listed below, in the order of execution. If you have further suggestions please let me know. I'll post a new sample once I get something better!

deinterlace the video using QTGMC.
stabilize using deshaker
fix chromatic aberration using fixchromaticaberration() or mergechroma( awarpsharp2)
fix white balance using ColorYUV(autowhite=true) or manual (turn down luma gain, use gradation curves in virtualdub)
fix chroma noise using FFT3DFilter (plane=3)
crop edges


Also I'm not quite clear on the resolution, as my understanding was that 720 x 576 is for PAL and 720 x 480 is for NTSC, but now I heard that I strecthed the video and correct resolution is 640 x 480. If this is the case, doing a simple "resize" to 640x480 will fix it?

To be honest I didn't feel the video is strecthed, but I will play and compare to see how it looks!

Thanks,
Carlos

[poisondeathray]

You will have to adjust/play with the parameters for best results and according to your tastes . For example , I find QTGMC oversharpens on default settings

Don't fix the color fringe until after fixing the white balance , you may find proper white balance may get rid of a lot of the blue fringe problems already

If you are recovering luminance highlights , do it in avisynth before you import into vdub or convert to RGB (ie. do it in avisynth with smoothlevels() or some other filters) . Once you use filters in vdub, it will convert YV12 => RGB using Rec.601 and you will lose the highlights .

To get best results in deshaker, you have to crop black borders

PAL and NTSC SD DVD use non square pixels. The equivalent square pixel ratio for 4:3 NTSC is 640x480. Another option is to encode with aspect ratio flag either in bitstream or container (ie. encode it as non square pixel) . But for online sites like youtube, you have to prepare them with square pixel, or use the player flag 16:9 or 4:3. (not all sites have the player flag)

[robjv1]

Yeah I need to look into one of those too, noticed I've been getting some complaints lately about photos I've used for a project are much too light. Not sure what has changed on my system (or my eyes)

Jagabo, I think your monitor is off. Mine is calibrated. I've seen 2-3 of your fixes recently, and they tend to be just as off as the original footage. Better, yes, but still quite a ways off. Look into that.

Consider a Spyder: http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2F...reative=390957

A big issue I see in the video is chroma noise.

[cfelicio]

Yeah I need to look into one of those too, noticed I've been getting some complaints lately about photos I've used for a project are much too light. Not sure what has changed on my system (or my eyes)

Jagabo, I think your monitor is off. Mine is calibrated. I've seen 2-3 of your fixes recently, and they tend to be just as off as the original footage. Better, yes, but still quite a ways off. Look into that.

Consider a Spyder: http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2F...reative=390957

A big issue I see in the video is chroma noise.

A bit off topic, but a colorimeter that is much better than spyder is Eye One Display 2, costs 199 on amazon

If you are on a budget, you can get the same colorimeter (without the fancy software) on sale for only $69, search for colormunki create. Then can use dispcalGUI as software to calibrate.

[lordsmurf]

I'm not going to spend the time it takes to get more exact results. You're welcome to spend your time getting better results for the OP.

Nah, I'm trying to help you out.

[cfelicio]

Hi All,

Thanks so much for the suggestions. I didn't get to play with deshaker yet, but here is the script I got so far for converting my videos:

SetMTmode(5,0)

DirectShowSource("testclip.mpg")
ConvertToYV12(interlaced=true)
AssumeBFF()

SetMTmode(2)

QTGMC(Preset="Slow")
SelectEven()

ColorYUV(autogain=true,autowhite=true)

Crop(8,0,-8,-0)
LanczosResize(640,480) 

FFT3DFilter (plane=3)
LSFmod(strength=120)

And here is the result, which is MUCH BETTER than my original conversion, thanks to all of you!!


Can you please have a look at the screenshots and (if possible) at the video, and suggest further improvements / corrections to the script above? I will later change the autogain / autowhite once my colorimeter arrives, so these can be kept for now.

I noticed chroma aberration is so much better now, but still visible at some parts of the video (look at capture 2). I tried to use mergechroma(awarpsharp2) but didn't see any difference, any other ideas?

Also, I used lanczos to resize, but also heard about spline, which one is usually better? Also I must say I noticed a HUGE difference in the video aspect ratio, much better now at 640 x 480, thanks for the hint!!

Cheers,
Carlos

[Gavino]

You could make the script a little faster by doing the crop and resize before calling QTGMC.
Since there is no vertical resizing, this should not interfere with the deinterlacing.

[poisondeathray]

1) be careful about using directshowsource() with temporal filters , it's not frame accurate and you can get mixed up frames . It may occur with things like QTGMC . I would use DGIndex and DGDecode.dll instead

MPEG2Source()

2) You still have chroma noise in the screenshot, you might want to increase fft3dfilter strength for chroma denoising, or tweak it to your tastes
FFT3DFilter(plane=3, sigma=4, bt=3)

3) I think you've might have introduced "flickering" with the auto filters, there seems to be big jumps in frame to frame luminance in the video sample

Also, I used lanczos to resize, but also heard about spline, which one is usually better?

There are different types of lanczos and spline

e.g. spline16 is softer than spline36
e.g. lanczos4 is very sharp compared to lanczos (both produce ringing)

There are a few others too, spline64 etc...

spline36 is comparable to lanczos, but very slightly less ringing

I noticed chroma aberration is so much better now, but still visible at some parts of the video (look at capture 2).

I don't think it's actually chromatic aberration (in the sense of caused by a lens).

The residual stuff is tough to handle in avisynth . It's very diffuse and blurry. So it may improve some areas but make other areas worse. You can try to improve it before using fft3dfilter (because chroma denoising will make it more diffuse) , and play with the parameters. I don't think you will improve it much
MergeChroma(aWarpSharp2(thresh=204, type=1, blur=24, chroma=4, depth=32))

Even with other programs it will be tricky (e.g. if using masks or secondary color correction), because the range of hue beside the "blue" chairs shares too much similarity. If you remove it, you remove the "blue" from chairs as well. In contrast, the "teal" glow in the bottom right of the screenshot is easy to remove, because it's hue range is different from the "blue" chairs.

[lordsmurf]

It looks to be blooming from the video signal, not CA.
The leaves don't have CA, and CA tends to be an edge issue more than center.

So I agree with poison.

[poisondeathray]

You can improve the flickering by using some deflickering filters. Donald Graft's deflicker in vdub seems to work ok on your sample clip (there are others as well - several in avisynth and msu has a plugin). Another approach would be to use manual white balance and color correction. The problem with some "auto" filters is they look intra frame only, and not temporally. So luminance changes across frames can be dramatic, and scene changes and fades can be very poor. I don't think there is a temporal component to ColorYUV() - it's only spatial per frame

PS . I wouldn't bother trying to fix the color fringe or the "bloom" or whatever it is in avisynth. It's too diffuse. Those 2 suggestions will only help with thinner color fringing. If you have access to other programs like AE, you can get rid of the teal fringing easily. But the blue fringing by the blue chair is difficult to isolate by color - so you would have to do manual rotoscoping and masks to isolate it

[lordsmurf]

The damage is uncorrectable, for the most part.
It's generally a mix of optical and signal. I see it on film and video.

[cfelicio]

Hi All,

Thanks a lot for the feedback!

I made some changes to the script based on that:

MPEG2Source("smalltestclip.d2v")
ConvertToYV12(interlaced=true)
AssumeBFF()


Crop(8,0,-8,-0)
Spline36Resize(640,480) 

QTGMC(Preset="Slow")
SelectEven()

MergeChroma(aWarpSharp2(thresh=204, type=1, blur=24, chroma=4, depth=32))



FFT3DFilter(plane=3, sigma=4, bt=3)
LSFmod(strength=120)

ConvertToRGB(matrix="PC.601")

So, I removed the setMTmode as I got some "livelock" on Virtualdub. Now it is running a bit slower, but nothing is freezing.


Also, I think it's easier to fix highliths / white balance on virtualdub later, so I added converttorgb (with pc.601), this will preserve the highlights so I can recover them later, right?

Regarding the crop, I want to crop a bit more because there's still some garbage at the bottom of the video, will that influence the resize in any way? The only thing is that I need to keep it multiples of 4 (since it's in YV12 colorspace), right?

Thanks!
Carlos