Capturing an Deinterlacing DV Footage is nigh impossible

[Pendell]

All I want to do is capture the old home movies from my Canon ZR40 in the best format, then deinterlace that footage in Yadif x2. Unfortunately, no one has a clear-cut guide on how to do this. I'm going to walk through my process and how it has abruptly come to the dead end that has marked my last straw in trying to figure this crap out myself.

Originally, I had a MiniDV camcorder and kept all the videos I shot on it on their tapes in a small wooden cigar box. It wasn't anything special, a forgettable Canon model, so forgettable I haven't even seen VWestlife or uxwbill talk about it on their channels. At this time I was still using an old Dell running Windows XP Home Edition. I found a cheap no-name Firewire card and an old Apple Firewire cable about to be thrown away at my school. I realized this could finally allow me to archive the footage and perhaps edit it together into a highlights DVD for my family, since the tapes date back to 2013. The Firewire card was recognized by WinXP with no need for drivers, much to my delight. After searching for a while, I found a program for capturing this footage; WinDV. I used it in, I believe Type 1 mode, with the letters "iavs" in parenthesis, as Type 2 - "vids+auds" - didn't output any audio that VLC could pick up; though from what I've heard Type 2 is the real uncompressed DV capturing format? I don't know... That's one of my many confusions.

I captured all the footage from a tape of me and my cousins from summer 2014 to an external hard drive, and there they sat until recently. I would always play them in VLC Media Player with Deinterlacing turned on and "Yadif (x2)" selected, as it was simply the best looking. All combing gone completely, totally smooth moving, and somehow a high level of detail retained throughout. However, it appears that you can't simply "apply" these temporary deinterlacing solutions to videos permanently, which is such an extreme nuisance. There it is, perfectly deinterlaced, right in front of me, but it's not actually.

So after I got my new, better rig and got Adobe Premiere and such installed, I searched up how exactly to go about deinterlacing the footage. I thought, There must be a simply way, surely! Some freeware a college student wrote in a month where you select a file, pick your deinterlacer, and click a button! Clearly, I was incorrect. My searching led me to AviSynth, a program with no user interface. You have to type out scripts and open them as video files in Windows Media Player (specifically that program!) for it to do anything useful. I installed it, downloaded the Yadif plugin for it, and to test it I copied one of the most prominent video to my internal HDD and tried to open it in AviSynth. What happens? Error Message. "AviSource couldn't locate a decompressor for fourcc dvsd". So I've finally hit a brick wall I can't tumble over haphazardly.

So I call out to all you more experienced video nerds: WHAT DO I DOOOOOOO. I moved the Firewire card to my new rig, so I can happily recapture the video if that's needed. I was wondering if capturing with Premiere Pro CC 2015 would do my any favors... Or maybe Type 2 in WinDV is the best option? But as far as I could tell it didn't record audio, so... Uh... Help.

Please.

My sanity depends on it.

[manono]

First, install a DV-AVI codec. I'd recommend Cedocida. Free and good.

With that done, have you installed AviSynth? Not sure? Then make a basic AVS (a text file with the extension .avs rather than .txt). Maybe call it Version.avs.

Inside stick a single line:

Version()

Save it and try to open it in Virtual Dub (forget Windows Media Player and never ever use it again for anything). Open it like this:

File->Open Video File.

Does it open? You can see the version of AviSynth you installed? If nothing happens you never installed (or installed properly) AviSynth.

Assuming you can see the little rectangle with the version information, you're ready for the next step.

Make a new AVS file, maybe calling it Movie.avs. Put it in the same folder as the movie with the same name. Inside that Movie.avs put a single line:

AVISource("Movie.avi")###adjust for the real name of your video, if necessary

Does it open in VDub? You can scroll around and see the movie? If so, now add Yadif to the script:

AVISource("Movie.avi")
Yadif(Mode=1)

You'll have to have downloaded Yadif (which you have done, right?) and put the Yadif.dll somewhere (usually in the AviSynth plugins folder). Read the included doc about how to use Yadif. You have to add a line to your script explicitly loading it into your script, something like this:

LoadCPlugin("C:\Path\To\Yadif.dll")### fill in the exact path
AVISource("Movie.avi")
Yadif(Mode=1)

Try and open that in VDub.

For any step along the way that results in an error, please post your complete script and the exact error message. And Yadif isn't even close to being the best deinterlacer available for AviSynth. Baby steps, I guess.

[Pendell]

First, install a DV-AVI codec. I'd recommend Cedocida. Free and good.

With that done, have you installed AviSynth? Not sure? Then make a basic AVS (a text file with the extension .avs rather than .txt). Maybe call it Version.avs.

Inside stick a single line:

Version()

Save it and try to open it in Virtual Dub (forget Windows Media Player and never ever use it again for anything). Open it like this:

File->Open Video File.

Does it open? You can see the version of AviSynth you installed? If nothing happens you never installed (or installed properly) AviSynth.

Assuming you can see the little rectangle with the version information, you're ready for the next step.

Make a new AVS file, maybe calling it Movie.avs. Put it in the same folder as the movie with the same name. Inside that Movie.avs put a single line:

AVISource("Movie.avi")###adjust for the real name of your video, if necessary

Does it open in VDub? You can scroll around and see the movie? If so, now add Yadif to the script:

AVISource("Movie.avi")
Yadif(Mode=1)

You'll have to have downloaded Yadif (which you have done, right?) and put the Yadif.dll somewhere (usually in the AviSynth plugins folder). Read the included doc about how to use Yadif. You have to add a line to your script explicitly loading it into your script, something like this:

LoadCPlugin("C:\Path\To\Yadif.dll")### fill in the exact path
AVISource("Movie.avi")
Yadif(Mode=1)

Try and open that in VDub.

For any step along the way that results in an error, please post your complete script and the exact error message. And Yadif isn't even close to being the best deinterlacer available for AviSynth. Baby steps, I guess.

Well, if Yadif isn't the best, I would love to hear your recommendation for a better deinterlacer.

Anyways, this didn't quite work out. I ran the script exactly as you presented it, and did get a deinterlaced output on VDub, however, my audio was gone and when I saved to an AVI file the output file was SEVEN GIGABYTES, even though the source file was 470mb.

Since apparently Type 1 AVI videos have the audio data "interweaved" with the video data, I think that's why VDub simply could not find it. If I were to recapture the footage in Type 2 AVI do you think I would fare better, given that the video and audio tracks are separate in that format? And would using VDub as the capture program be a good idea as opposed to WinDV? (and while we're on the subject of WinDV, what's the unlabeled checkbox between the Config and Capture buttons? It doesn't identify itself as anything at all...)

[manono]

QTGMC is far and a way the best deinterlacer. Unfortunately, it's difficult for a beginner to get it working and the good settings make it pretty slow. I think hello_hello has a package that includes everything you need to get started with QTGMC...

You can find it here:

https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/383321-How-to-load-QTGMC-for-use-with-megui#post2484787

It can be pretty intimidating. There are other deinterlacers better than Yadif that are fairly easy to get up and running, but QTGMC is the best.

Anyways, this didn't quite work out.

Looks to me like it worked out fine. I provided instructions to get AviSynth and Yadif going and you did. Good going. As for the audio, what happens when you open the script with only the AVI:

AVISource("Movie.avi")###adjust for the real name of your video, if necessary

In VDub, when you go File->File Information, is there audio listed? If so, you can extract it for use later on using File->Save WAV.

...when I saved to an AVI file the output file was SEVEN GIGABYTES, even though the source file was 470mb.

You have to choose and configure a codec. What's your intended final output? If not some kind of AVI you can open a working script in the encoder of your choice. Or you can use VirtualDub FilterMod which allows encoding to many additional output formats. Me, I use VDub for working on scripts and making lossless intermediate AVIs and then take the final script to other encoders, depending on what I want to get, finally.

And would using VDub as the capture program be a good idea as opposed to WinDV?

Not for DV-AVI, it isn't. I use WinDV myself, as do many others.

Edit later: I was at a different computer yesterday. I just checked my WinDV and it's set to capture as type-2. So make sure you do that in the future. That might make some of the info I posted above wrong or at least irrelevant. I have that unlabeled checkbox unchecked.

[JVRaines]

So after I got my new, better rig and got Adobe Premiere and such installed…

Why not use Premiere's deinterlacing and be done with it?

[Pendell]

Why not use Premiere's deinterlacing and be done with it?

Well I'm not sure what process Premiere uses for deinterlacing. I want the footage to look as best as is possible.

[smrpix]

Why not use Premiere's deinterlacing and be done with it?

Well I'm not sure what process Premiere uses for deinterlacing. I want the footage to look as best as is possible.

Premiere's is very similar to Yadif.
https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/using/interlacing-field-order.html



edit: Another thought...

Why deinterlace at all? Edit your DV material as DV. Anything un-effected will literally pass through premiere untouched -- you can't get better quality than that. Then watch the final result with VLC at your favorite Yadif (x2) settings.

[Pendell]

QTGMC is far and a way the best deinterlacer. Unfortunately, it's difficult for a beginner to get it working and the good settings make it pretty slow. I think hello_hello has a package that includes everything you need to get started with QTGMC...

You can find it here:

https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/383321-How-to-load-QTGMC-for-use-with-megui#post2484787

It can be pretty intimidating. There are other deinterlacers better than Yadif that are fairly easy to get up and running, but QTGMC is the best.

I found a tutorial online for how to use QTGMC specifically with MiniDV footage. I'm going to recapture it all in Type 2 AVI and follow this guide.

You have to choose and configure a codec. What's your intended final output? If not some kind of AVI you can open a working script in the encoder of your choice. Or you can use VirtualDub FilterMod which allows encoding to many additional output formats. Me, I use VDub for working on scripts and making lossless intermediate AVIs and then take the final script to other encoders, depending on what I want to get, finally.

I understand very little about codecs, unfortunately - I really need to read up on how to use them. I would like a lossless output in reasonable size, as I'm trying to archive these videos in the highest quality possible, but at this rate not only would my 1tb external hard drive fill up far too quickly, but my computer lags horribly playing the output videos as it attempts to process the data as fast as the video requires. It's literally unwatchable! I don't understand how simply deinterlacing a 500mb file could create a 7gb file. Does the process really need to create that much more data?

I wish there was a simpler way to do this... When I started my search for a good deinterlacer, I was hoping to find a program where you click a button a wait for ten minutes. Instead I have to travel down this crazy rabbit hole.

[Pendell]

Why deinterlace at all? Edit your DV material as DV. Anything un-effected will literally pass through premiere untouched -- you can't get better quality than that. Then watch the final result with VLC at your favorite Yadif (x2) settings.

These are going to be authored to DVD's and played on Progressive Scan television. They need to be deinterlaced. I would also like to use MiniDV/Digital8 in the near future in a video project to really give the footage that zero-budget early-naughts home movie look. I want the look to be charming, not disgusting.

Also, if Premiere does a good enough job, I might do that if this falls through!

[aedipuss]

good god no. do not deinterlace. dv footage is perfect for dvd spec mpeg-2. hardware de-interlacing in the player or tv is much better than any software deinterlacer. just make sure you match your output mpeg-2 to the dv input BFF(bottom field first)

[manono]

I understand very little about codecs, unfortunately - I really need to read up on how to use them. I would like a lossless output in reasonable size...

Well, unless you choose a codec in VDub, by default it encodes as uncompressed. If you want lossless (big, but not nearly as big as uncompressed), get and install Lagarith or UT Video Codec or some such, choose one and encode.

These are going to be authored to DVD's and played on Progressive Scan television.

By definition, QTGMC and all bobbers double the framerate (to 59.94fps if NTSC). But NTSC DVD doesn't allow 59.94 frames per second. It allows only 29.97 frames per second. Once you decide to use QTGMC for deinterlacing before later reencoding for DVD, you have a couple of choices. You can make it a single rate deinterlacer with its FPSDivisor=2 setting, perhaps combined with one of its motion blur settings for smoother playback. Or you can reinterlace the bobbed output afterwards.

They need to be deinterlaced.

No, they don't. You certainly do not have to make it progressive as your television has its own deinterlacer, and one probably much better than Yadif. Which is why others are advising not to deinterlace at all. If it's for something else - for upload to YouTube, for example - then, yes, it has to be deinterlaced. You don't have to (and many say should not) deinterlace for DVD.

[LMotlow]

To add to manono's post above: Standard DVDs are either interlaced or coded as interlaced. Besides, deinterlacing doubles the number of frames and doubles the frame rate, which won't work for either DVD or BluRay-SD, and no authoring program will accept it. You can deinterlace and maintain the original frame rate by dropping alternate frames, which throws away 50% of your temporal resolution and causes judder during motion and pans.

Maybe you should get some basic knowledge about video structures, which isn't difficult, before you spend big bucks on Adobe. You've already stated that you don't know anything about codecs -- that can be dangerous with a software package like Premiere.

[_Al_]

if you have Avisynth installed and Cedocida I did a script that deals exactly with that, you just drop DVavi file on any BAT file in this DV avi helper.zip (unzip first)
it can 2x deinterlace with QTGMC (included) to get MP4 or put DVD in your drive , setup letter drive in settings.INI and drop that DVavi on that batch that makes DVD's (no menu, it does not deinterlace , DVD's should stay interlace as original is). If you do not put DVD in your drive it just stops and waits for it or you just can use that VIDEO_TS that it makes (to test it etc.)

it just might work for you right away, or it might not. If it does not work , it is perhaps due wrong syntax (use paths and filenames only with simple characters, no weird characters , parenthesis included) or due to QTGMC trouble on your computer (with your avisynth version etc), so then just follow recommendations and do it yourself manually like you are being instructed so far (most importandly do not deinterlace for DVD), but you just might give it a shot, it is going to cost you couple of minutes or so to try it