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  1. Member
    Join Date
    Jan 2008
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    United States
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    Hi,

    I am trying to save some of my old HI8 Camcorder movies to DVD. Some of the tapes appear in rather poor shape and show bright horizontal lines that flicker across the image (see enclosed sample). Those lines are present on the camcorder screen so they are not an artefact of the digitization. The tapes are about 10 years old and high quality Metal Particle HI8 tapes. Same camcorder as recorded:

    Questions:
    1) What causes this noise
    2) Any suggestions how to get rid of it. I have played around with some Virtualdub filters but I'm not an expert and the number of possiblities seem endless.

    I'd appreciate any help preserving those memories.

    Thanks much
    Axel



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  2. Member edDV's Avatar
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    Mar 2004
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    Northern California, USA
    Search Comp PM
    The cause is tape dropouts. Hi8 tape particularly ME tape had dropout issues where magnetic holes appear in the tape from wear or aging.

    Solutions

    First try head cleaning. A digital dropout compensator device detects dropouts from low tape playback modulation. The device will copy video pixels from the lines above and below to fill the hole. A quality video dub house will have this equipment. It may be a function of their Hi8 playback deck, TBC or Framestore.

    There may be a software denoise application that does something similar.
    Recommends: Kiva.org - Loans that change lives.
    http://www.kiva.org/about
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  3. Member Soopafresh's Avatar
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    Jan 2004
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    United States
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    There is an Avisynth filter, can't recall the name at the moment.
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  4. Always Watching guns1inger's Avatar
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    Apr 2004
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    Miskatonic U
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    descratch ?
    Read my blog here.
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  5. Member
    Join Date
    Jan 2008
    Location
    United States
    Search Comp PM
    Thanks for everybodies advice. I have called around locally (Seattle) and haven't found anybody willing to take this on. I've played around with some of the filters without much luck. It occurred to me that these "drop outs" occur at different locations in the image in each frame . They are most often the brightest spot in the frame. Wouldn't it be possible to simply identify these spots by their brightness (some threshold) and replace them with and interpolated value from the previous and following frame? Or a filter that selects replaces the frame with the minum of two adjacent frames. Is this naive? I tried the frame merging filter which helps but since it seems to average the frames it doesn't really remove those lines. Is there an existing filter (combination) that could be configured to do that job?

    Thanks much
    Axel
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