Best way to Mask out Betamax video dropouts using hardware?

[Deter]

Hello,

Have a few old betamax recording that mother time has taken its toll on.

It is the normal betamax issue with white or black specs of lines that pop up in the video from time to time.

Was wondering on the hardware end? Does anyone know of equiptment that will mask out these drop outs and replace the bad pixels with corrections.

Have pulled apart some of these videos and normally it is just a bad frame that needs to be fixed. Sometimes it is a lot of frames...

Have a few different Betamax machines, in testing, the drop outs are the same on each machine.

It is known, that the problem is in the video tape and not the players.

Does anyone provide a service to fix these types of problems, currently only have like 3 or 4 tapes with drop out problems. It may be easier to just send the tapes off to someone else.

[2Bdecided]

Is it 100% identical each time?

Similar problems with VHS (due to worn heads during record, or play) aren't perfectly identical.

You can capture three times, and use an AVIsynth script to patch together the three versions automagically. In theory.

In practice, each time you capture you also get subtly different horizontal offset, TBC errors, and sometimes even frame drops on bad tapes! This makes it near impossible to patch them together in this way.

Cheers,
David.

[lordsmurf]

@2BD
I generally see the drops in the same locations on VHS and S-VHS tapes (and 8mm and Hi8, for that matter).
It's tape defects.

[edDV]

Pro formats (U-Matic up) use hardware dropout compensators (DOC) that monitor FM RF off tape to trigger pixel replacement from line above or field before. When the RF envelope drops, pixels are replaced. For this to work you need a pro deck with an RF out connector and a TBC with DOC.

Software methods have greatest difficulty detecting dropouts vs. normal picture content (e.g. noise or object edges). Once detected, pixels are copied from previous or subsequent fields or an interpolation.