Advanced Restoration - Removing tracking lines from Video

[Deter]

As many of you know, VHS tapes have issues. Many times in the video u will get tracking or scan lines running in the video. This may be as small as a single frame up to many frames.
To be able to enjoy the videos in the best possible playback it would be nice to blend out these errors or remove them from the video itself.

I have a few methods that I use personally to try to fix this. It is very hard than sometimes it doesn't blend in to the film that well.

Looking for advise or knowledge from different types of success some of you have had with pulling or blending out tracking lines in a video.

Before some of you say this is not possible to do? It is possible.....

[filmboss80]

I have a few methods that I use personally to try to fix this.

Have any Before and After sample clips to post? Other that a bit of cropping or zone de-noising, I don't see how you can efficiently get satisfactory results. I'd be interested in seeing what you've accomplished.

[jagabo]

Like in this thread? https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/328735-25-Year-Old-VHS-with-Tracking-Issues-and-Damage

[Deter]

filmboss80,
Didn't want this post to be about my methods. Kind of want to find out what other people do.

I'll will be honest to do this for entire 2 or 3 hour video is a lot of work. If I had to do this as a service I would charge a lot of money, cause it takes hundreds of hours.

#1 You need to find the errors in the video
#2 You need to know how many frames the errors last
#3 You than need to look at the frames before and after the error and think of a method to use.

a) One method of recovery is to paint out the tracking errors out of the frame itself (Graphic Design)
b) Another method is to cut and edit the film. This gets tricky with blending it back in.
1) This method is kind of hard to explain other than advanced creative editing.
c) Another method is to drop the video signal and fade to black - worst method but it works
d) You can drop the frames out of the video, and than blend the video back together
1) This is tricky but if you are good or lucky, u can do this with out anyone even knowing.
2) Sometimes just missing that one frame will cause a jitter in the video or a motion problem.
a) Where this gets sloppy is if the errors run for more than 4 frames.

- When the scene changes is usually a good cut off point for editing, cutting and remixing the sound + video together.
- Sometimes u can blend out the errors speeding up or slowing down the frames when replacing the bad frames.
- Something like a massive video drop out has to be pulled out of the video and u have to re-blend the video.
- You can always re-record the video again and adjust the tracking to see if u can pull the error out, u than just have to blend the scene back in to the movie.

One way to do this is to use different VCR's, however not all VCR's look the same in playback so u may need more than 1 of the same VCR.

The entire key to do this is to make the viewer not even know it is being done....However most people don't look at things in such detail to even find the tracking lines in the video itself. Now I have trained my eye to find these. How is this done....U look at scene. As soon as u spot one unnatural change in the video. You have the error, u than need to figure out how to get rid of this error.

Not sure if a temporal filter or cleaner would blend some of the tracking lines out...

Because this takes so long to do, trying to find methods to help pulling out tracking lines.

The more methods you can come up with or have is the key.
You can than apply different types of restoration to help fix the problem.
Than u can decide which method works best and than put the results in your final copy of the video.

Every error is going to be a different problem to take on. The key again is finding the best method for that error and having it blend in to the film.


Jagabo,

Looked that post before.....That is saying u have a copy of the tape that plays that error well. I would say your avg VHS tape recorded to a VCR has hundreds of errors per tape.......

[budwzr]

What I have done before with great success is to composite two copies, the front layer has the problem chroma keyed out, and the rear layer is offset just enough to let the good part come through. This can be keyframed along the entire video and "jiggered" as needed.

The best method is using salvageable parts of the same video as repair material, and use the least amount of patching possible, or don't try to make it too perfect, you just want to camouflage it.

Let's say you have a sky shot of a fighter jet passing by, and some balloonist sails into the frame and you want to get rid of it. You can cut a hole around the balloonist and offset the back layer video to show sky through that hole.

That piece of sky will have the exact same characteristics you need to make the patch, you can't get that from a piece of clipart or other stock "sky footage". Of course, proper blending goes without saying.

[filmboss80]

I have occasionally dealt with poorly tracking tapes, and in the worst-case scenario, had to remove the VCR cover and adjust the tape skew. I don't recommend that, as it can screw up your VCR, but when desperate...

As for dropout, I have always used a TBC with dropout compensator. It's not perfect, but helpful. I have also painted out errors in individual frames (cloning good parts of the image and replacing bad parts), but only on short clips. It is labor intensive.

[pirej]

Are you talking about something like this?
I have an old video with a lot of "tracking"(among others) problems, and i keep coming again to it, over and over... and never found a acceptable outcome.

[Deter]

pirej,

This would be the goal to get the picture to look like page 2 of your thread...

If this can be done in software that would be great....

Yea it could be a single frame that is damaged, however what happens when it is like 4 to 10 frames where the tracking scrolls thru the video.

Kind of read thru that post and it states that sometimes u get more details removed. To make this easy just compile the bad scene in the video. Run it through the scripts and than put it back in.

Maybe that is an idea. Never really used scripting.....

Wanted to use remove dirt on a few videos however couldn't get the scripts to install and run in virtual dub, kept getting error messages. Sent the video off to someone who has it installed correct. The problem on that tape was more of oxide drop outs in the video. The end product turned out a lot better than the source.

Even if this frame per say doesn't blend in to the video, u can than edit in a photo program and blur out the scan lines or u can even replace the pixels.

This example seems to be acceptable......U can kind of see the tracking in this picture but from the org picture the restored frame looks pretty good.

[pirej]

Deter, you didn't wanted this thread to be about you're methods, and yet , you say "..it's possible.."
HOW?? Give as an example of your work, or is it that you think it SHOULD be possible?

[filmboss80]

There's a post on the thread that jagabo pointed to earlier:

https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/328735-25-Year-Old-VHS-with-Tracking-Issues-and-Dam...=1#post2037366

You could do one pass with the tracking set to where the noise is near the bottom part of the screen; then capture a second pass with the tracking adjusted so that the noise is near the top part of the screen. Then, you could do a split-screen between the two sources (synchronized, of course), showing the best halves.

[Deter]

Pirej,

This is the method, as stated above....

Lets say you have 10 bad frames in a scene

1) You edit it out the video
2) You blend the video around the frames
3) You can go in and paint the frames

How do u paint frames?
Every Video is broken up in to moving pictures....Every picture is broken up in to pixels or dots......


You pull the 10 frames out. You than pull out 10 frames from before and after.....

You should have enough material to than work with....

You line the pictures up in a story board A to Z......

You go through the pictures....Now the video is moving and not a still shot so u have movement....u pretty much have the textures, colors and objects to work with....


You find the errors aka Tracking, than you re-paint that area....

Or u can blend it out....

Watching something on TV? Can u see a single frame? YES

Better yet u can see the results of that frames from the other frames around it.

We will use the movie Fight Club for this example...Don't have a copy of this movie but have seen it and actually looked for these inserts in the film. They are basically 1 frame flashes, all over the movie....

What u do is this, don't have a copy of this movie again, if u want to upload this clip, I will go in a pull brad pitt out of the video.....

It is this simple. You take the frame and take the last frame and pull Brad Pitt by cutting the picture....U than paste back, the last scene and he is gone...

It is a little more advanced when u have to go in a re-paint the scene but the concept is the same.

Or u pull that frame out of the video, and see if u can't pick up that it is gone, or blend the video to not be able to tell that he was in the video. Lets say Brad is in this scene for 10 frames and u want him gone....That is a little bit harder to deal with.....

[pirej]

Thanks filmboss80, i saw that thread before, and its a logical and doable solution/fix, except my video is probably "re-recorded" with the tracking problem included, its a 3 generation video, so i cant adjust the tracking( i tried with several vcr-s).

Deter, im not really complaining/arguing so please don't take it to your hart , maybe i didn't understood what kind of restoration you are talking about, i have tried editing frame by frame and it can give great results, but 25p video= 1500 frames in a minute(25i=3000/minute), so editing it frame by frame its...!?!?!
And again, with this example with "fight club".. i understand the concept, and i have done it for some other reasons(inserting me in a movie) on a good looking video, but it almost has nothing to do with fixing tracking issues.
Its easy to fix some occasional "tracking line" that its not really a tracking issue.. in a couple of frames, but usually tracking is present in most of the video, not just a couple of frames.

[Deter]

Pirej,

With out seeing your problems it is kind of hard to come up with a solution.
Multi-Generation copies you are going to get all kinds of problems, color bleeding and everything else. Tracking through the entire video? Tracking lines already recorded on the tape, make it more of a sloppy mess.

No idea what u are trying to salvage, or what the value of it is to you.

If it is just complete mess of a recording, not really a point of frame painting it......

As long as the Audio is ok, you can turn it in to a CD, or wav file. You can make it telesnaps......Or you can just crop the film to a point were u cut out the tracking. Than make it wide screen. If the overall quality is just horrible, their is only so much u can do...One of things I did before was took a horrible video and turned it in to something off the wall tripy with heavy video effects.


Saw those pictures u posted in the other post, the quality looks terrible. Another idea when u have something that poor is to turn the film to B&W and than work on sharpening and getting different parts of the film to an acceptable picture. Would also than crop the video cut out all those lines. (basically just remove the entire bottom half of the picture.)

[2Bdecided]

In AVIsynth, descratch can remove single line errors - you need to use turnright() before and turnleft() after. Beware of artefacts.

There's also video inpainting, but it doesn't usually work well.

You can easily replace single bad frames with mvtools 2.

Cheers,
David.

[pirej]

I got some interesting result with a sample with REALLY bad tracking problems.


i used

AVISource("C:\test.avi")
AssumeTFF()
SeparateFields() 
TurnLeft()
DeScratch(mindif=1, maxgap=20, minlen=2, blurlen=15, keep=2, border=0, maxangle=0)
DeSpot(interlaced=false,p1=20,p2=12,pwidth=768,pheight=576,mthres=80,merode=33,sign=0,show=0,seg=0,color=true,motpn=true)
TurnRight()
Weave()

Then i denoised it with MVDegrainMulti, then i crop-it and overlay-it over the (denoised with smdegrain)original test clip+levels
edit: this is 3-th generation copy from 1973

[sanlyn]

This example seems to be acceptable......U can kind of see the tracking in this picture but from the org picture the restored frame looks pretty good.

The restoration is 'way too red. Looks weird.

[lordsmurf]

I've given my detailed full assessment in the original thread.
That's over at http://www.digitalFAQ.com/forum/showthread.php/tracking-lines-video-p13642.html#post13642

In short, there's really just nothing that can be done.
Manual repainting thousands of images is the only way to guaranteed restore this.
Read my post for detailed explanation.

From a professional angle, repaint would be required. There's no decent filter trick.

The only possible solution may be a $10k TapeChek.
Those are discussed here: http://www.digitalFAQ.com/forum/showthread.php/tapechek-pro-344.html
Results not guaranteed here, either.