Rate my Setup - Capturing Digital8 and Analog

[Sharc]

Looks ~ok. Go ahead. I am away from home for a couple of days now with no access to my desktop PC.
And don't focus too much on a single scene or screenshots only. Include daylight scenes with darks and brights in your tests to find the settings compromise. Avisynth's (or ffmpeg's) histogram and waveform monitor are the tools for more detailed analysis.
Next step would probably be post-processing.

[Bermuda1]

Set your brightness and contrast correctly using the VDub histogram, as per my guide here.

Hey Alwyn,
so I used the method as per your guide. Changing contrast has the exact effect that you specified - however, changing brightness never really changes anything on the left hand side "no go zone" (see screenshots). The video itself obviously changes in brightness massively. Thanks.

[Sharc]

@Bermuda1: FWIW here the waveform monitor of your capture 1.2....avi of post#30. You can see that the wavy signal below the picture fluctuates nicely between 16 (darks) and 235 (brights), so the contrast setting reduction from 128 to 120 was nearly perfect. No need to change anything.
(Perhaps set the contrast to 119, just nitpicking )

Added: Also, the RGB clipping at 255 is very moderate only. You are good to go.

[Alwyn]

@Bermuda, your first histogram is better, Brightness-wise. But because the Brightness moves the whole histogram to the right, you need to then lower the contrast to bring the right end back, out of the red.

So, set the left edge first with brightness, then adjust the right edge with the contrast.

I do find that bumping up against the left end is OK, whereas the right edge must be kept inside the red. As Sharc mentioned, you can fine-adjust the "levels" in post-processing, so if your captures need a little more contrast, that can be adjusted.

[Sharc]

While "Brightness" usually shifts the entire histogram towards left (darks) or right (brights), the reaction on "Contrast" depends on the capture device/driver. Some fix the dark level and shrink/expand the brights from there, others fix the center level and shrink/expand darks and brights relative to the center.
Also, when fiddling with contrast one may have to readjust the saturation as well in order to prevent excessive out-of-gamut values (e.g. clipped RGB upon conversion).

[Bermuda1]

Thanks. This has been incredible helpful and I am very happy with the video settings.
After recapturing, I now face the issue that audio and video are not in sync. I attached my "Timing" settings and "Disk I/O" settings. What am I doing wrong?

[Bermuda1]

Thanks. This has been incredible helpful and I am very happy with the video settings.
After recapturing, I now face the issue that audio and video are not in sync. I attached my "Timing" settings and "Disk I/O" settings. What am I doing wrong?

So I now tried using AmarecTV instead of VirtualDub. Followed the instructions as per www.aaproductions.net/amarectv.htm. Used Graphstudionext to ensure I keep the same settings for contrast etc. as above. No issues with audio or video sync in AmarecTV !

[Alwyn]

Excellent!

[aramkolt]

@Bermuda1: FWIW here the waveform monitor of your capture 1.2....avi of post#30. You can see that the wavy signal below the picture fluctuates nicely between 16 (darks) and 235 (brights), so the contrast setting reduction from 128 to 120 was nearly perfect. No need to change anything.
(Perhaps set the contrast to 119, just nitpicking )

Added: Also, the RGB clipping at 255 is very moderate only. You are good to go.

Gotta ask, how did you generate those waveforms for the video clips? Looks handy!

[Sharc]

Ffplay/ffmpeg
Or similar (easier) with avisynth or perhaps vdub2 ....

[lordsmurf]

Thanks. This has been incredible helpful and I am very happy with the video settings.
After recapturing, I now face the issue that audio and video are not in sync. I attached my "Timing" settings and "Disk I/O" settings. What am I doing wrong?

You need to:
- auto disable resync when integrated
- disable timestamps for preview

[Bermuda1]

Thanks. This has been incredible helpful and I am very happy with the video settings.
After recapturing, I now face the issue that audio and video are not in sync. I attached my "Timing" settings and "Disk I/O" settings. What am I doing wrong?

You need to:
- auto disable resync when integrated
- disable timestamps for preview

Thanks for the suggestions. Unfortunately, it did not have any noticeable impact. There is still a massive lag between video and audio when I use VirtualDub.

[Alwyn]

@Aramkolt, re waveforms, here are some in AVISynth codes (remove the # for the one you want to use; the crop is to remove the black bits so they don't interfere):

LSMASHVideoSource("yourfile.mp4") #that's for an MP4, use AVISource for analogue AVIs.

ConvertToYV16()

#Crop (clip, int left, int top, int -right, int -bottom, bool "align")
#Crop (10, 0, -16, 0)


#Waveform across the top of the video:
#TurnRight().Histogram().TurnLeft()

# waveform on side:
#Histogram()

#Coloured Histogram on right:
#Histogram("levels")

[Bermuda1]

So I've got my video files in the HuffYuv format now. Can someone redirect me to a thread in this forum (Search not that helpful) or help me out in figuring out which software to use to post process the files? My standard software, DaVinci Resolve (free version) does not support .avi in huffyuv. Thanks!

[Sharc]

Avisynth+, for example.
For davinci and other NLEs which cannot open .avi convert (export) it to ffv1 (lossless) using ffmpeg for example.

[Bermuda1]

I have another issue that I cannot explain myself. On the newer, more recent HI8 tapes, I see a difference between DV and S-Video capture regarding the borders. The S-Video capture somehow has black borders...see the attached screenshots (left = DV; right = S-Video). I also attached my AmarecTV settings, where the correct format for PAL video tapes (720x576) is selected. No cropping selected, from what I can tell (see screenshot). Why would it create these black borders? Any clue? Thanks!

[Sharc]

I have another issue that I cannot explain myself. On the newer, more recent HI8 tapes, I see a difference between DV and S-Video capture regarding the borders. The S-Video capture somehow has black borders...see the attached screenshots (left = DV; right = S-Video). I also attached my AmarecTV settings, where the correct format for PAL video tapes (720x576) is selected. No cropping selected, from what I can tell (see screenshot). Why would it create these black borders? Any clue?Thanks!

Re-read posts#15,19.

[Bermuda1]

I have another issue that I cannot explain myself. On the newer, more recent HI8 tapes, I see a difference between DV and S-Video capture regarding the borders. The S-Video capture somehow has black borders...see the attached screenshots (left = DV; right = S-Video). I also attached my AmarecTV settings, where the correct format for PAL video tapes (720x576) is selected. No cropping selected, from what I can tell (see screenshot). Why would it create these black borders? Any clue?Thanks!

Re-read posts#15,19.

Ok, it’s all making more and more sense to me. Let me try to rephrase what I understand from your post:
- the black borders while capturing S-Video are fine as it should capture in 12:11
- in post-processing I then crop to 704 (no more black borders) and then encode as 4:3

Am I on the right track?

So a more general question would be, why is this not the case / necessary for DV? Is that just a „feature“ of the codec / of capturing via FireWire? It appears that there is more information on the right and left that is incorporated in the DV as it does not capture in 12:11.is this not a disadvantage of S-Video then?

Thanks for your help, again!

[Sharc]

The PAR (Pixel Aspect Ratio) of DV depends on the camera model. It may be 12/11 with some extra side pixels included on the sides (for padding to 720), or 16/15 with the full 720x576 frame representing the 4:3 picture. It has been discussed in earlier threads, I just can't find these now.
For S-video the inner ~704x576 represent the 4:3 picture. It is given by the standard Rec601for analog capturing. So yes you are on the right track.

[oln]

I think we've concluded in some earlier threads that the analog outputs on these camcorders do blank a tiny bit on the left/right of the image that is not blanked on the dv out for whatever reason.

What am I doing wrong?

I would try changing the sync setting to "sync audio to video by ...." - I've never been able to make it work by using the "do not resync" setting.

[Bermuda1]

The PAR (Pixel Aspect Ratio) of DV depends on the camera model. It may be 12/11 with some extra side pixels included on the sides (for padding to 720), or 16/15 with the full 720x576 frame representing the 4:3 picture. It has been discussed in earlier threads, I just can't find these now.
For S-video the inner ~704x576 represent the 4:3 picture. It is given by the standard Rec601for analog capturing. So yes you are on the right track.

Okay, I now created three video files:
1. Followed your instruction and cropped to 704x576 - then I changed the display size to 768 to get a 4:3 aspect ratio --> The crop is not sufficient for the black bars on the left, right and bottom to be gone - is that how it should be? Not really noticable on TV but on the PC.
2. Cropped more to 700x572, then I applied the upscaling option in Handbrake to get it to a scaled size of 704x576 (display size set to 768)
3. Cropped more to 700x572, did not apply the upscaling option but reduced the display size (set to 762) to get a 4:3 aspect ratio

I am not really sure which option is best. I feel like Nr. 1 is not optimal because of the black bars. Nr. 2 seems to match your recommendation best (aspect ratio, scaled size etc.), but I am not sure about using this "upscale" option and whether it impacts quality or what is happening there in genereal... Nr. 3 results in a video that looks fine, but does not have the recommended scale size.

Some more advice would be really appreciated! Is there perhaps something wrong with my capture since Nr. 1 still results in black bars although it should not?

Thanks!

[Sharc]

Deleted, double post.

[Sharc]

Read and learn about PAR, SAR, DAR, sampling, resizing and circle tests, etc. You find probaly 100s of posts on this subject. Sorry but I don't find the time to go through all this now. Maybe someone else may chime in....

[Alwyn]

Followed your instruction and cropped to 704x576 - then I changed the display size to 768 to get a 4:3 aspect ratio --> The crop is not sufficient for the black bars on the left, right and bottom to be gone - is that how it should be? Not really noticable on TV but on the PC.

I'll chime in but I do things differently: as early as I can, I set up a square pixel workflow. That is, I take 8 pixels off each side straight away because that's what the experts say to do.

After that, if there are no black edges, I resize it to 768x576 or 1440x1080.

If there are black edges that need to be removed (personal preference, some here mask them), I just crop to the 4:3 ratio. For example, if I need to take off 6 pixels from the top, I'll take 6 x 1.33333 total off the sides. If I need to take 8 pixels off the sides, I'll take 8/1.3 total off the top and bottom.

Make sure all your crops are in even numbers.

Then I'll resize 768x576 or 1440x1080. If you're exporting to H264 in Virtual Dub, for the "Save", leave the SAR on 1 and 1. For an AVI export from VDub into another editor, there is no SAR/DAR/PAR, it is all based on the frame size for AVI. Provided the frame size is the desired display aspect ratio eg 4:3, the next editor will know how to display it.

My flak jacket is now on!

[Sharc]

@ Bermuda1: Before you even think of resizing vertically you have to deinterlace the interlaced video, or you will damage it irreversibly.
(And you can for example crop 10 left and 6 right = 16 total if your borders are not symmetrical).

[Bermuda1]

Great help and support and thanks for the keywords that help me read up on things and learn!

Ok, so I started over in this step of the process and also did read up on DAR =SAR*PAR. Still difficult to grasp tbh…

Anyways, so far, I have deinterlaced the original huffyuv .avi file using Avisynth+ in VirtualDub (keeping everything else the same: codec, uncompressed audio, format, etc.).

From how I understand Sharc, this is the first step before I start cropping and converting to mp4 in Handbrake. Using Handbrake, I would now follow Alwyns logic above to crop the video further, removing the black edges (also on the bottom) while keeping the 4:3 DAR (no upscaling required then).
I’ll give an update once I have something to show…