All the bad video

[magillagorilla]

This community has been great in helping me restore hours of family video footage. I'm about 1/3 done with my analog stuff. Big thanks to everyone!

Having said that, I now find it impossible to watch old footage on the internet and actually pay attention to the content. I was watching some old news and interviews from the 80s, I'm guessing from VHS or Beta and all I could think was, man that's some bad chroma noise they could have fixed or that deinterlaceing is terrible. huhu thanks videohelp

[redwudz]

I had the same problem when I put in my BD player and HD system and video projector. DVDs look terrible now.

[sanlyn]

I had the same problem when I put in my BD player and HD system and video projector. DVDs look terrible now.

Something wrong here. DVD ought to look like DVD on your HD setup, just lower resolution than BD.

[jagabo]

DVD ought to look like DVD on your HD setup, just lower resolution than BD.

Maybe that's his complaint.

[sanlyn]

DVD ought to look like DVD on your HD setup, just lower resolution than BD.

Maybe that's his complaint.

If all you're watching is pixels, before long BD won't look good enough either. Resolution isn't the biggest factor in good PQ. But, yes, it does count.

[magillagorilla]

My comments were about the poor exceuse for video "conversion" I see on the internet. A properly mastered DVD looks great. A poorly mastered BD looks bad. VHS caps that don't have the most minimal chroma, levels, deinterlace repairs are really hard to look at.

[NJRoadfan]

Yeah, there are A LOT of bad VHS dubs on YouTube. Timebase errors, bouncy video, chroma noise, tracking problems, ugh.

I actually have some before and after clips on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmEvPZUdAVI

Original capture I did back in 2000. I captured this using my Matrox Marvel G400-TV (SB Live! for audio) using a GE VG-4240 VCR for playback. No TBC used at all. I did properly deinterlace it, but I didn't bother to crop borders, and I compressed the crap out of it using DivX 3.11 to e-mail to people. Note that the color is somewhat off too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxC6PytZMqc

This is after some learning. I captured this using the AVermedia HD-DVR card using my JVC HR-S7800U and AVT-8710 TBC. I cropped borders and deinterlaced before uploading to YouTube. A vast improvement over the older video.

As for a "non-optimal" source, here is a newscast I captured off of an EP speed tape using my JVC SR-VD400US (our resident NYC area posters might enjoy this). It was recorded with a 1980s Panasonic VCR off our noisy and over boosted cable TV system and the tape was about 25 years old and dubbed over a few times. I used the same process above, except I didn't de-interlace as this video went to DVD (my friend ripped the DVD and posted to YouTube).

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEXlTUsP3DQ
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8CuVxKsneQ

Whats amazing is it didn't take much to go from a crappy conversion to a good conversion of a VHS tape. Most Youtube uploads of old commercials from the early 90s look downright horrible!

[sanlyn]

My comments were about the poor exceuse for video "conversion" I see on the internet. A properly mastered DVD looks great. A poorly mastered BD looks bad. VHS caps that don't have the most minimal chroma, levels, deinterlace repairs are really hard to look at.

Oh. Absolutely, 100% with ya there. Add horror stories about how so-called "HD" cable outfits wreck old tv shows (weird processing, too, like many old SD shows stretched wide and blurry to make it look like HD? Gimme a break).

[NJRoadfan]

My comments were about the poor exceuse for video "conversion" I see on the internet. A properly mastered DVD looks great. A poorly mastered BD looks bad. VHS caps that don't have the most minimal chroma, levels, deinterlace repairs are really hard to look at.

Oh. Absolutely, 100% with ya there. Add horror stories about how so-called "HD" cable outfits wreck old tv shows (weird processing, too, like many old SD shows stretched wide and blurry to make it look like HD? Gimme a break).

How about poor de-interlacing and worse, reversed field order on the MPEG encoding of interlaced content.

[sanlyn]

And people thought analog had problems! Digital made many improvements, but sloppy work often looks worse than noisy analog.

[magillagorilla]

Digital gave people too many options, well it gave the average user too many options. It's really a multi-factor issue. A lot of video suffers from the low bandwidth effect. Back in the pioneering days of digital video on the internet, 1998-2004ish , high speed connections were slower if you had one at all. I think people cranked video down to rediculously low bit rates for them to work online. Music suffered from this era as well. The presets on many of the crappy video applications at the time also assumed a low bit rate for internet footage. To add to all of that, many of our favorite codecs were still in their first itterations.

Then you have transfers with bad hardware and editing with crappy NLEs. Run an SD cap of a VHS tape through a $50 VCR, a composite capture device, and edit it in say, PowerDirector, then encode it in a 300kbps MPEG2 file. Yuck!

I waited until I had semi-proper hardware and software before I tried to archive directly to PC. My first attempts were VHS to DVD Recorder and it was horrible.

There is no comparing some of my original DVD recorder footage to my Huffyuv>Avisynth>MP4 work. I am miles ahead of where I was in 2005.

It's refreshing to see that I have learned quite a lot when I see such bad transfers on youtube.

Video restoration is very complicated work. Don't take your skills for granted. The average video consumer will never understand all that goes in to proper video creation. For that matter I am still a noob.

[dragonkeeper]

I had the same problem when I put in my BD player and HD system and video projector. DVDs look terrible now.

I second that, it funny how when DVDs came out i thought to myself "man that picture is awesome" now i think DVDs are an eyesore so I'm now in the process of trying to find my favorite DVDs in some form of HD. For those i can't find I'm having to convert to mkv and fix as many of the flaws as i know how. FYI Stripes was released on Blu-ray to day . Another one down only 500 or so to go.

[redwudz]

I've worked with some very bad older video at times from off the net. Just about everything conceivable has been done to some of them. VHS conversions that really needed a TBS. Bad PAL>NTSC conversions. VHS switching noise on the frames, or just noise at the edges.

8mm film to video with color errors. Or bad cropping, or conversion with programs that leave watermarks. I already knew most of those people were clueless, but it still amazes me how bad they can mess up a video trying to save a few bytes of filesize. Some only improve with something like NeatVideo and lots of filtering. Others, you just have to chop out all the bad parts and save what's left over.

And yes, I meant my perceptions of what is quality video changed when I saw HD video. But I also noticed that many commercial DVDs are really low quality, probably because of poor conversions from the 35mm film to DVD. I convert most of my BD disks to MKV, about 8GB size. If I convert them again to DVD, they still seem to have better quality than many of the commercial DVDs I have.