'Fake' official VHS copy - can anything be salvaged ?

[DB83]

I obtained via Ebay a quite rare VHS err um so rare that this guy seems now to have plenty of copies.

The tape comes in a proper card type case which is par for a US recording, perfectly printed with all logos etc (Columbia Tristar )- not the plastic type cases with inserts we get over here in the UK and was preported to be NTSC.

However the tape plays like a PAL tape (the other NTSC ones I have would stall in my capture unit unless I change the settings)

But playback is by no means smooth. There is consiberable 'combing'. The impression I now get is that it is a not-so-clever 'fake' made from a dvd. But someone has certainly gone to a lot of trouble with the packaging.

I have triied various capture settings - reversing the field order, delinterlacing etc but none will remove the 'combing'.

Anyone have any thoughts on this. And before you say it, this particular film is not officially available on dvd.

[Deter]

Is this guy selling bootlegs?
Is it a copy of a tape?

This is a problem with ebay, people sell fake stuff all the time. Everytime they lie about it, when u question them. Only when u take action, in when u get your money back.

[SHS]

what did you buy as the name of movie or show.

[DB83]

The movie is 'Save Me'. 1994 film with Lysette Anthony.

[MOVIEGEEK]

As far as I can tell it was only released on VHS.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108045/

The tape is probably legit but wornout.

[dphirschler]

Could it be a poor PAL > NTSC conversion? I read (here on this forum) that it happens all the time with low-budget releases.


Darryl

[victoriabears]

http://cgi.ebay.com/Save-Me-1993-With-Harry-Hamlin-Lysette-Anthony_W0QQitemZ1704301159...item27ae6d308c

is the best chance I can find for you, even Ioffer.com does not have it, so seemingly rare one you have there.

If you either want to buy the uk sourced one and ship it to me or ship your apparently crappy vhs you have I'll convert and enhance it for free as I often do as one-offs, and that way I get the movies as well, looks interesting.

PM me if you wish to do this.

[DB83]

http://cgi.ebay.com/Save-Me-1993-With-Harry-Hamlin-Lysette-Anthony_W0QQitemZ170430115980QQcmdZViewItemQQptZUK _DVD_Film_TV_Videos?hash=item27ae6d308c

is the best chance I can find for you, even Ioffer.com does not have it, so seemingly rare one you have there.

If you either want to buy the uk sourced one and ship it to me or ship your apparently crappy vhs you have I'll convert and enhance it for free as I often do as one-offs, and that way I get the movies as well, looks interesting.

PM me if you wish to do this.

I suspect the various versions I have seen on Ebay come from the same source.

Despite what it says on the tin, this VHS is most definately a PAL copy. What puzzles me is how the people who did this managed to create what appear to be interlacing artifacts into the video.

Had a spare hour or so tonight so I did a straight VHS >> DVD dub with my dvd-recorder. Don't think that would have worked if it had been an NTSC tape and, naturally, the 'combing' is still there. I am going to do some filtering on the various captures that I played with earlier and even on this later dub just to see if there is a solution.

But thnx for the offer. I may well get back to you on this one.

[SHS]

Try read this
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2003/07/cleaning.ars

[lordsmurf]

I'd like to see what the "combing" looks like. Sometimes people use wrong terms.

[DB83]

The 'effect' is most noticable with camera movement:[/img]

[lordsmurf]

Something funny is definitely going on here, no studio is that inept.

What about Deinterlace Area-Based in VirtualDub? Try that one.

[DB83]

Something funny is definitely going on here, no studio is that inept.

What about Deinterlace Area-Based in VirtualDub? Try that one.

But then no studio was harmed when this 'version' was made.

My theory is that someone made a poor dvd version of this with interlacing artifacts (There is no noise on the bottom of the screen as you normally get with VHS). Those artifacts were then hard-coded into the VHS copies. Like I said, the box says NTSC, the video is PAL. An official PAL video (for the UK) would certainly have a BBFC certificate for 1994.

The net resuslt - and I have since tried all sorts of deintetlace options and IVTC - is that the capture retains the artifacts and nothing can be salvaged from it.

[classfour]

Two listings on amazon. Many vendors, looks to be mostly ex-rental stuff. If one had a nice VCR, nice copy of the original tape; one could do some good for their personal viewing.

[vhelp]

I'm no expert, but based on what I observed in the image you posted above, its possible that you have a copy of a poor ntsc_vhs -> pal_vhs conversion. Someone applied the (NTSC->PAL) *resize* of the frames at the wrong stage in the conversion process, maybe before or after the framerate step, or maybe its a combination of multiple issues, all done wrong or bad (and yet to be discovered--you only posted on image, one issue) so far. And, worse, they did not even review the finished conversion at any stage, and re-transfered it to vhs.



The way I determined this:

When I split that image into fields, I could see there were two distinct images: one was jagged and the other was clean but shifted to the left (or right) depending on how you observe it.

Also, there is noticable macroblocks (Pixelation) in that image you posted above. This could be from your dvd record (your vcr->dvd_recorder) no doubt. But to minimize any room for possible problems in these kinds of conversions it is always best to use the analog capture card route.

However, if this is a consumer-scam copy (as seemingly evidenced) you can probably discern this by properly re-capturing the tape using an analog capture card and capturing uncompressed.

Then:

A) If you don't see any macroblocks then something else is causing those issues you see, and the copy is legit. But I doubt this on account of your example image.

B) If you do still see macroblocks in the uncompressed source then you have a scam copy, and a bad one at that, and as has been told in countless other thread topics, this is not something you can correct.

Still, in either case, you should always use the analog capture card, to uncompressed avi.

EDIT: something else I just noticed in that image (I only quickly glanced at it earlier) that image seems to be part of a "blended" frame. When you look at Michael Ironside's head, you see part of it moving (leftward) while the other part (rightward) is still. I don't think this is related to any temporal noise reduction process. So, that frame was probably part of a blended operation, framerate related.

-vhelp 5302

[DB83]

Interesting info "above". I did not realise one could split a still image into fields.

I did try to discard one field from the video using various editors/encoders(vdub, procoder) but never achieved that result - the distortion was still present. Maybe I did something wrong ?

Unfortunately, I do not have the disk space to capture the whole thing uncompressed but I may try a sample later this evening.

[DB83]

Two listings on amazon. Many vendors, looks to be mostly ex-rental stuff. If one had a nice VCR, nice copy of the original tape; one could do some good for their personal viewing.

Call me sceptical but I imagine that > 99% of these are also 'fakes' given that this became unavailable a long time ago and now suddenly there is a dearth of them. But I am not about to spend any more cash to prove that.

[vhelp]

You know, lots of people get the wrong belief when they think they must capture the whole source in one setting. You don't have to, you can capture in small segments, that includes test segments for reviewing purposes

I capture tons of stuff every day, or almost every day. I now souly use lagarith. No more dv codec type captures because I am fed up with the macroblocks it contains on noisey sources like vhs. I want an exact repleca of the source, if I can't get that then near it. Anything that contains macroblocks or pixelations is lossy, too lossy. And dvd-recorders exhibit this in most cases. Yesterday, in my researches, I found an old 2007 analog capure I did of the vhs version of The Fifth Element, and I did it in uncompressed yuv422 format and I had used composite connections, and to my surprise, using the ATI TV Wonder VE card, the one that had the composite only connection option. I reviewed it and found that it did not contain chroma crosstalk, something you get a lot of in composite and s-video connections. But I was surprised (did not notice it back then, possibly because I wasn't fully aware/familiar with it at the time) to see it in a low-grade card, when my Winfast XP card has a better 2d/3d-comb filter for this kind of connector. Anyway.

I have directv again, (they use mpeg4) and it contains a lot of these and other issues, so I have to compremise somewhere in between. But I was trying to say, I capture uncompressed (via lagarith) to a usb-2 external 1TB drive. Its loaded with tons of captures from short segments to full length, minus commercials.

The 1TB costed around $99, but I have smaller hdd's too. You can pick up an usb-2 external 250gb for about $70 or less. I mean, you only need one of these, maybe a 160gb for even cheaper, will be more than enough for your 90 minute movie.

-vhelp 5303

[2Bdecided]

I'm no expert, but based on what I observed in the image you posted above, its possible that you have a copy of a poor ntsc_vhs -> pal_vhs conversion.

Yep. I've seen that before on some home movie footage that had gone NTSC>PAL.

I reckon there must be a cheap standards conversion box or VCR that does exactly what you see here - a dumb frame resize without proper regard for the interlacing. Or maybe you have to chain two specific pieces of equipment together to get this "unique" effect! Or maybe something somewhere does this when you try to capture NTSC as PAL.

It'll be a challenge to undo it. You'd need to post a clip, not just a still image. If there's a repeating pattern of good/bad fields, maybe some appropriate selectevery() commands in AVIsynth can give something usable?

Cheers,
David.

[lordsmurf]

Most cheap POS boxes do drop-frame deinterlacing -- it's terrible.

[DB83]

As requested I have now upped an approx one-minute sample of the video - same sequence from the still.

http://rapidshare.com/files/333695736/save_me_crap_pal_sample.avi

(DV 'capture' through a canopus ADVC300)

Now if some kind fellow wants to take a look at this and suggest a work-around....

[mazinz]

I will be visiting my local mom and pop video store either tomorrow or by Saturday. If this did have a US vhs release and I see it at the store, will pick it up for you (they still have rows upon rows of vhs that he is now selling and trying to get rid of)