Confused - why do I need VirtualDub?

[Dear Prudence]

Hi

Could someone clarify this for me.

I have got Premier Pro 1.5 + ADVC 100 with a Panasonic VCR with TBC and DNR,

Initially to transfer/edit lots of 20 year old VHS tapes.

I am not getting the quality I thought I'd get.

I have read a lot posts where VirtualDub is suggested the best thing to use.

My question;

What can VirtualDub do for me - that PP Pro can't?

I am getting very confused.

Cheers - Stephen

[Krispy Kritter]

The short answer....nothing.

But assuming you are encoding to mpeg2 for DVD backup, it is a better encoder.

Your quality issue, most likely, is a result of your capture hardware or source.

At what stage of the process does the video quality look "bad" to you?

[edDV]

Post some frame caps (from Premiere DV timeline) of your typical results. We can see how you are doing at the pre-encoding stage.

[Dear Prudence]

Thanks Krispy.

The VHS tapes are old - but when played the quality is still very good.

I am very new to all this - but I have tried;

NO compression
Default compression (PP Pro)
MSU
Alparysoft

I have tried with & without TBC/DNR.

On PP I have set it for;

Video for Windows
DI/DV PAL (1.067)
Lower Field First

I have a 14inch TV.

While in Capture the PC monitor and the TV look OK. But when I click on the saved .avi file off the hard drive (to play on Windows Media Player) the quality is less sharp, and very slightly skin tones are "blocky".

I am trying to get the best quality before I burn.

*** I haven't tried No Fields (progressive Scan) yet.
don't understand it - yet!

Am I expecting two much?

Thanks - Stephen

[wwjd]

How are you viewing the video? If you are judging the video based on playing it back on your PC then you make want to burn it to a DVD and watch it on your TV. Always keep in mind that what you view your video on has to be setup properly, ie color, saturation, brightness and so on...

Virtualdub is a neat free software app that many use because there are many already written video filters that can be used to lighten, darken, sharpen ect.....

[Dear Prudence]

Thanks edDV.

I will post a sample tomorrow - I can't do it now.

[edDV]

How are you viewing the video? If you are judging the video based on playing it back on your PC then you make want to burn it to a DVD and watch it on your TV. Always keep in mind that what you view your video on has to be setup properly, ie color, saturation, brightness and so on...

Virtualdub is a neat free software app that many use because there are many already written video filters that can be used to lighten, darken, sharpen ect.....

Playback with a media player on the computer is arbitrary (uncalibrated) depending on overlay settings in your display card preferences and should not be used for source quality judgement.

A frame cap would tell us lots. Here are some ideas.

1. ADVC-100 switch in 0.0 IRE position*?
2. Use ADVC-100 and TV monitor to view video. TV connected to ADVC. Premiere pro set to monitor over IEEE-1394.
3. Calibrate TV to SMPTE color bar (DV levels)
4. Are you capping to DV project format (DV timeline)?
5. Learn to use your scopes in Premiere Pro.

* ADVC-100 Switch2
0.0IRE for PAL or DV camcorder sources, 7.5IRE for North American NTSC (TV and VHS) sources.


Ref:
http://www.videouniversity.com/palbars.htm
http://videouniversity.com/tvbars2.htm

[TheFamilyMan]

For more info on capturing, check out this link:http://www.digitalfaq.com/dvdguides/capture/understandsource.htm
Viewing AVIs with mediaplayer is not an accurate means of judging the quality of the footage, unless you know what you are really look at. As suggested, take a sample or two and process them to a DVD-RW and watch it on your TV and judge those results. Video noise can really screw-up MPEG2 quality. The noise may not be noticable when you watch it on the TV, but it's there. This is where vdub comes in, for it can be used to clean the video noise captured in the AVI files. Now your VCR's noise reduction may be sufficient, or may not. Your posting of a frame of your captured footage will help all the folks around here a lot in diagnosing you problems. Good Luck.

[Nelson37]

I don't know what Krispy was thinking, but Vdub is not an encoder. It is a simple editor and preview tool with LOTS of available filters.

Now, on to your problem. You state the captured AVI looks blocky, with bad skin tone colors. Forget the color issue, this cannot be properly judged either on the PC or from PC output to TV. Color scheme is different, you must put on disk and play from DVD player.

But the blocky effect is something that must be addressed first, before anything else. Such errors will be greatly magnified by DVD encoding and must be eliminated. Since this is a DV-AVI, there is the first step. Either use a different DV codec, or use Huffy codec on an AVI file. If this cannot be done, there is the answer to what is wrong with your capture software. Chuck it and get something else.

Never mind, just read you are using an ADVC 100. You are stuck with DV. So try a different app, WinDV is often recommended.

Premiere is primarily what I call a compositor, as opposed to a simple cut-and-paste editor. It may or may not be a very good capture program, at least in conjunction with your hardware. It does have some fancy effects which very few people use.

Something else about Vdub. It will play your video as true to actual content as ANY video program I have tried. The blockiness you see may actually be created by PP, and your playback may not accurately reflect the quality of your video file.

[spectroelectro]

Let's clear away the misinformation: VDub can do a ton of things Adobe Premiere Pro can't even come close to doing.

The big advantage of VDub is its video filters. There are tons 'n tons of video filters for doing everything from denoising to deblocking to depixelating to eliminating chroma noise to flipping the video upside down or sideways, or doing genuinely exotic stuff like converting a grayscale image to an arbitrary color pallette. Adobe Premier Pro can't come close to doing all that.

Also VDub is lightning fast. Avery Lee wrote it in very fast optimized code, so VDub's filters run orders of magnitude faster than the Adobe filters even when Premier's filters are comparable.

VDub is not an encoder. It's a video processor. It performs arbitrary mathematical operations on your video. You can design your own filters if you want to. There are tons of AviSynth filters and even more filters written specifically for VDub.

AviSynth is even more powerful, and has many of the capabilities of Adobe After Effects...except AviSynth is freeware. You have a learning curve to climb, but the upside of AviSynth scripts is that you can automate stuff, like how fast you zoom into a picture or how many subpictures open up inside your video frame, or things like that.

I woudl strongly recommend that you explore both VDub and AviSynth if you want to find out what is really possible with digital video, from video restoration, to exotic video transformations, to complex compositing of the kind you used to need Adobe After Effects or Mainconcept's Mainvision to do.

Last but far from least, you can frameserve with VDub (at least with several of the version of VirtualDubMod). That's a huge time and hard drive space saver. If you don't know about frameserving, you might want to look into it.

As an example of the power of Vdub:

MSU Deblock will solve your blockiness problem.
The color correction filter inside VDub will solve your skin tone problem.

[Dear Prudence]

PHeewwww!


Thanks so much for everyone's response.

Boy, have I got a lot to learn.

Just for the record, I was using SVHS lead from my Panasonic NV-SV121 VCR into ADVC 100.

I tried using the yellow composite lead - and the quality seemed to improve.

I won't post any framecaps ('cause I don't know what they are - or how to do this).

I'll keep experimenting.
Thanks again - regards, Stephen

[jimmalenko]

I won't post any framecaps ('cause I don't know what they are - or how to do this).

There's a sticky at the top of this forum entitled "How do I upload screenshots ? that you might find useful ...