Weird "ghosting" on captures (changed title)

[greymalkin]

hello all..

i have a panasonic pv-gs120 camcorder, but unfortunately the firewire port is blown out...i basically have to capture via the s-video port...so anyways..i captured with virtuaDub using huffyuv as the compressor. I believe DV video if it were transferred via firewire would be lower field first video...and capturing with my card producted upper field first video..thats my first question mark i had as to if this really converts it on the fly or does some other trickery...

(rest of this post has been removed as it has been ruled out as being part of the problem)

[greymalkin]

(this post deleted also)

[greymalkin]

(another wrong assumption edited out)

[The_Doman]

Did you try to change the "Swap fields on decompression" option of huffyuv?
Some capture cards need that option on for proper playback.

[greymalkin]

i actually just went back and captured it at full uncompressed .avi and while watching it in virtuadub as it's capturing it's fine..but when going back and watching the captured .avi file the same issue occurs.....this is really really messed up. i soooo wish the firewire port on this thing worked...i tried using my brother in laws canon miniDV camera, but when i tried to copy the dv file over using firewire i was getting blocks and other weird things in the video that didn't show up when i played it back in my camera...

[greymalkin]

i burned it to dvd again to see if for some reason it was just an issue on my computer but it's just as bad on the tv...this is just terrible...

a sample clip is here..it's a friends wedding video..it was taken on a miniDV camera and unfortunately my firewire port doesn't work...when playing from the camera it looks fine, but when capturing to huffYUV or uncompressed .avi (using my theater 550 capture card) i get this freaky ghosting effect...a sample is below (4mb)..i rendered it to mpeg at 4mbps to try and make a smaller file.

www.dlvee.com/bbwedding1.mpg

[junkmalle]

It looks to me like too much temporal filtering. Check the capture card's noise filtering settings. Field order looked fine for DVD -- TFF.

[greymalkin]

it has a comb filter that you can either set to 2d or 3d...then it has a noise reduction that was set to light..i set it to off but i still get the ghosting i believe..i'll tinker around with it some more....

[junkmalle]

it has a comb filter that you can either set to 2d or 3d...

3d filter = spatial (2d) and temporal (+1d) filtering.

[greymalkin]

fantastic..i'll set it to 2d and try again...it doesn't let me disable it altogether...

also..why do you suppose i don't get the ghosting when capturing straight from tv? (through the coax cable into the tv tuner/capture card.

thanks again for your help so far.

[SHS]

If have theater 550 capture why not capture it the rigth way greymalkin, By the way you do know that the 550 will not stick the setting it alway jump back to defaults setting the min you start recording

[greymalkin]

and what exactly is the "right" way?

[SHS]

MPEG capture and not the AVI capture

[greymalkin]

oh man...ring the bell..school's back in sucka!..

SHS,
please turn to page one of videohelp.com and begin reading.

junkmalle,
thanks a ton man. you were right on. In virtualdub there was a noise reduction filter checked, and I also went into the capture properties of my capture card, changed it to 2d, then set the value to 0..i'm assuming that essentially disables it. I then set the other filter values to 0 as well ( my source looks good enough on it's own, thank you very much!).

Anyways..i ran a test clip and not only did it look quite a bit better/sharper while capturing, the ghosting is now gone as well!

thanks for taking the time to look at the problem clip and for your discernment of the problem!

[junkmalle]

junkmalle,
thanks a ton man. you were right on. In virtualdub there was a noise reduction filter checked, and I also went into the capture properties of my capture card, changed it to 2d, then set the value to 0..i'm assuming that essentially disables it. I then set the other filter values to 0 as well ( my source looks good enough on it's own, thank you very much!).

Anyways..i ran a test clip and not only did it look quite a bit better/sharper while capturing, the ghosting is now gone as well!

thanks for taking the time to look at the problem clip and for your discernment of the problem!

Glad to hear it worked out!

[SHS]

greymalkin did you not say "when capturing to huffYUV or uncompressed .avi (using my theater 550 capture card)" I only saying you should try REALtime MPEG capture not just AVI.
Good to hear you was able get the filter setting to stick being I can't get them to stick when I apply them which I think has some with the fact that I only use Windows 2000.

[greymalkin]

SHS you are correct..i thought it had something to do with the format i was capturing in at first, but it turns out it was the filters..i needed to use huffyuv or uncompressed as i wanted to edit it out...

[SHS]

Then I take it was VirtualDub filters then in that case I see I was thinking GraphEdit.

[greymalkin]

It may have been virtualdub's noise reduction filter alone that was causing the problem, but i disabled virtualdub's noise reduction as well as the filtering done by my card just to make sure my capture was as close to source as possible.

I went into the video properties of the capture card in virtualdubs capture mode..went to the tab that shows the filters, changed the first to 2d and set the value to zero. I then set the other values to zero and hit apply. I went back one time and I think one of the settings had changed back. I set it to zero again and hit apply. From then on whenever i would capture and go back the settings had been retained.

I'm really glad this came up because I was always a little disappointed with previous captures because it seemed like some of the clarity and whatnot was lost..i know some of that has to do with the mpeg compression but I believe alot of it has to do with the fact that I was using noise reduction and 3d comb filtering all while capturing. For a VHS source I may want to implement some cleaning filters, but not for my pristine dv footage :P