Capturing from Sony TRV6, best means to retain quality.

[GeoffWA]

Hi All
I have camera and footage on tape (Pal SD on DV) from early 2000's. The original video was captured via Pinnacle Studio and firewire into large .avi files, uncompressed DV I think. When I look at the video now the jagged edges arising from interlacing is really noticeable. Is there anything to be gained from recapturing from the original tapes assuming they have not degraded?

cheers
Geoff

[jagabo]

No. If you captured DV via firewire it is an exactly copy of the compressed video on tape. The interlace comb artifacts shouldn't be visible on playback.

[LMotlow]

The original video was captured via Pinnacle Studio and firewire into large .avi files, uncompressed DV I think.

You think incorrectly. DV is not uncompressed. It's a lossy compression codec. If you have a 1:1 copy via Firewire it probably wasn't re-encoded (re-compressed). You'll get cleaner 1:1 DV transfers with WinDV. Pinnacle sucks for capturing.

[JVRaines]

In fact, if you recapture now, you will probably get worse video because there will be more dropouts on the tape.

[GeoffWA]

I don't know the level of degradation on the tapes, they have been stored in a cool dark and dry location.

Thought I would hook the cam up and try WinDV, if I can get the old PCI Firewire card to work with Win10

Have all the original AVI files, but they are definitely interlaced.

BTW the AVI files are about 14GB per hour of video, does this indicate the level of compression?

[smrpix]

14GB/hr sounds like DV. (Actually closer to 13GB/hr.)

If that is true you have a straight digital copy of your file. Whether it was done with WinDV, Pinnacle, Windows Movie Maker, Avid, Premiere or Vegas should make absolutely no difference in quality.

[LMotlow]

The quality loss would occur if you made changes to the image, such as denoising, color work, overlaying titles, transitions etc., and then saved the changes as DV again. This would re-compress as DV and incur more loss. Simple cut-and-join wouldn't matter, but if you expect to go through stages of intermediate work and keep re-saving as DV, you'd see degradation. For repair or restoration stages you should use lossless compression (Lagarith or UT Video, etc.) to avoid further loss before going to your final encode. DV isn't supported on the 'net, external players or smart TV's, so you'll have to choose a final delivery encoded format and go through one more lossy encode for MPEG or h.264, etc., or whatever you want for final output.

[GeoffWA]

Thanks for the replies people.

I'll take it the DV AVI files I have captured are as good as I can obtain from the camera.

I did some experimenting with short bit of footage displayed on 55" HD Sammy. The TV only has digital in so the Camera was hooked via composite to input on Topfield TRF 2400 then upscaled at 1080 to HDMI to screen. Then made 5 MP4 versions from DV file using myffmpeg, all at the highest bitrate and maintained PAL pixel count. Varied Yadif and frame rates etc. The files were played on WD Live upscaled to 1080 HDMI to screen. The WD Live would not play the DV AVI file.

The composite out from the Camera thru the Toppy looked the sharpest. Then tried S Video from Camera to Onkyo receiver which upscaled to 1080 HDMI to screen, which was probably better again.

I tried playing the MP4's on the Topfield, looks slightly better then the WD Live.

One of the MP4's was created without any form of deinterlacing and the jagged edges occurred when played on both the WD Live and Toppy.

So, has anyone found a consumer software/hardware path to edit and rerender DV files and play them back so they get quality hard to distinguish from playing straight from the camera?

[Candive]

I too have a little project of capturing and improving my old collection of analogue 8 mm and Hi 8 video tapes; hence my interest in your query. With regards to deinterlacing I found this youtube video where a deinterlace filter in Vdub is used to improve the quality of the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn_TDa9zY1c
And just browsing this forum and Doom9 some people (experts) have been very successful using Avisynth.
https://vimeo.com/2823934 The results look incredible.
I'm a newbee so I have a bit of a learning curve...

[GeoffWA]

I too have a little project of capturing and improving my old collection of analogue 8 mm and Hi 8 video tapes; hence my interest in your query. With regards to deinterlacing I found this youtube video where a deinterlace filter in Vdub is used to improve the quality of the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn_TDa9zY1c
And just browsing this forum and Doom9 some people (experts) have been very successful using Avisynth.
https://vimeo.com/2823934 The results look incredible.
I'm a newbee so I have a bit of a learning curve...

I decided to go down the path of deinterlacing the DV using AviSynth/QTGMC/VirtualDub.

Started a thread in Conversion Forum.
https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/385717-Some-Noob-queries-regarding-AviSynth