Capture image quality (does this look right?)

[nicknick]

I have tried several ways to digitize and restore VHS tapes.

At this moment i am trying to use my Pinnalce PCTV Studio Pro as capture device. While most captures trough my usb capture device were distorted they look almost perfect trough the pctv.


However i noticed a lot of "noise/lines" trough the image. I already turned on the noise reduction in virtualdub capture mode which seems to help. However i need to know if what i am having now is acceptable/normal or if should change some settings/hardware.


sample: https://forum.videohelp.com/images/imgfiles/El8KYFU.png


What is your opinion about the quality of the source?

[DB83]

How do you define right ?

VHS has noise. Without filtering you will get noise. Noise reducion can soften the image so indeed your picture is not 'right'.

I would not filter at the capture point unless you have hardware picture enhancement available - we do not know your equipment. Do it in sofware at the capture point as you have done could have damaged it and lessened the chances to restore with post-production filtering in avisynth etc.

[manono]

If you want to offer a sample, make it a video sample, not a picture. 10 seconds with steady movement is plenty.

While most captures trough my usb capture device were distorted

No idea what that means. Maybe that you were capping at 720x576 and people looked too tall and slender (if PAL). Perfectly normal.

However i noticed a lot of "noise/lines" trough the image.

If by that you mean interlacing (look it up), then also normal. Like DB83 I wouldn't denoise while capping, but later on.

[lordsmurf]

What VCR was used?

[nicknick]

@manono
Distorted in the sense that i was thinking about buying a TBC. (like this: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-LlfNjq-RXVg/T4L7FFFPbbI/AAAAAAAAAGM/k_N_L6YXq04/s1600/before.jpg)

It's not the interlacing, the picture looked quite noisy on my "capture" pc, however it looks quite a bit better on my pc here.


@DB83 & @lordsmurf
The hardware i'm currently using:
- Consumer grade VCR: JVC HR-S6700EU
- "hq" shielded cables (not the cheapest one's, not the most expensive)
- Pinnacle PCTV studio pro as capture device (bt8x8 chip).

[sanlyn]

If you just want us to go by the jpg, It needs more work. Without a video sample, there's little more one could say. But it doesn't look so great with all the chroma noise and dot crawl on the captions.

The image you just posted isn't a picture of a tbc. If you mean that buying what people typically mean by a frame-level tbc, it won't fix the problem you pictured.

[DB83]

A single still does NOT, as manono states, give ANY indication for the need of a tbc. There is no distortion(other than AR) in that pic IMHO just noise.

Post a sample video representative of any issues you really think are present else we will get nowhere.

[nicknick]

I agree, I will post a video sample tomorrow.

What i meant with TBC is that if i capture trough a usb capture device, i get a very distorted picture like the one in the picture.
Recording trough the pctv, the picture isn't distorted.


I will record a video tomorrow and it will be much clearer. Sorry for the picture.

[sanlyn]

We only need about 10 or 15 seconds, unprocessed, straight from a capture, with some motion going on, such as someone moving, walking, turning around. That sort of thing. If you have to make a new capture to get it, don't denoise during capture; we need to see as much as possible what your source looks like before it's gone through processing with filters.

[nicknick]

I have captured a new sample.

The strange thing is, that the video seems better when uploaded on youtube.
It might be related to the interlacing after all.


How would you rate the capture quality of this sample?

[lordsmurf]

The VCR is crappy, and it has timebase errors (no TBC).
The capture is not very good, no.

[manono]

How would you rate the capture quality of this sample?

No way to tell (beyond what LordSmurf said) as YouTube has already reencoded it. Follow sanlyn's previous instructions.

[DB83]

You might think your youtube sample is 'unprocessed' but It HAS been converted, de-interlaced and anything else yt cares to throw at it.

Just upload the original to the forum as an attachment.

[lordsmurf]

You might think your youtube sample is 'unprocessed' but It HAS been converted, de-interlaced and anything else yt cares to throw at it. Just upload the original to the forum as an attachment.

It has lots of chroma noise and timebase errors. You can see that on Youtube. I don't even need to see more -- it's crappy, the end, get a better VCR. No need to beat a dead horse here, let's all move on and get the OP into a better VCR.

[nicknick]

Thank you for your honisty.

Buying a new VCR would be the best option. But i think that will have to wait for now.
Just so i don't miss out on a bargain, if you would have to choose between a JVC SR-S388 and a Sony SVO-9500MDP. What would be your pick and what would be a acceptable pricetag?

[DB83]

The noise was there in the original cap.

I do not question your knowledge, LS, but I just looked at the original hosted vid at yt. Playback appears different and I do wonder if the OP has done himself few favours by embedding this.

[nicknick]

The noise was there in the original cap.

I do not question your knowledge, LS, but I just looked at the original hosted vid at yt. Playback appears different and I do wonder if the OP has done himself few favours by embedding this.

I will try to upload it tomorrow, the clip is 500+mb atm so i will try to shorten it.

[sanlyn]

Ahem, yes, well -- as lordsmurf and others suggest, uTube videos can only tell us how uTube screwed it up. The capture won't be perfect, of course, but if you're capping to DV (not the best thing to do with VHS, but so be it), you can use any of several apps to cut a few seconds without re-encoding. Or if you're capping to MPEG, you can use the free DGIndex utility to make a slice with no processing.

And, no, we don't want 500mb. 10 or 15 seconds is plenty. The uTube scene would do nicely. If you need help cutting a few secs of video, just ask. There are plenty of free apps that can do it without damage.

[DB83]

Unless my maths are way out 32 sec @ 500 meg is not DV. It's not even lossless.

[sanlyn]

It's probably lossles at full frrame and RGB.

[lordsmurf]

DV = 13GB/hour
So...
1GB = 1/13th hour (60/13 = ~4.6min)
500MB = ~2.3 min
250MB = ~1.2 min
125MB = ~ 40 secs
63MB = ~20 secs

Huffyuv = ~x3 (35-40GB/hour)
So 20 secs = ~190MB

Uncompressed 4:2:2 = ~75GB/hour
So 20 secs = ~370MB

Honestly, anything less than 20 secs doesn't show enough. Even that's too short, but workable.

[nicknick]

I thought i used huffyuv and captured with virtualdub, but have no idea why de file is this big. Will check it this evening.

Any suggestions about the vcr's i named in Post #15?

[sanlyn]

I thought i used huffyuv and captured with virtualdub, but have no idea why de file is this big. Will check it this evening.

We might be wasting some time of our own by guessing about the file size matter, but AT LAST you are giving us some information about your capture. Apparently you have capped to lossless AVI (???) -- abd now I'm guessing myself. But earlier you seemed to have alluded that you captured to DV. (NOTE: "DV" and lossless are not the same thing).

If your capture is lossless AVI, there's a different way to make a sample without processing. But first, do yourself and the world a favor: get a copy of the free MediaInfo utility. Download it to a separe folder and run the installer (if you see an offer to also install some other stuff like toolbars, etc., just uncheck the boxes and avoid the extra stuff. That ad keeps MediaInfo free for all of us). Open MediaInfo and then use it to open your capture file. It will show some info, but you want to click on the "View" menu at the top of the window and choose "Text" view. Mke surE you copy all the data in the Text view -- that window often opens itself as scrolled down to the bottom -- ridiculous, but easy to scroll up and copy/paste all of it. You can either copy that text and paste it in a reply here, or you can export the whole report to a text file and attach it to a reply.

Any suggestions about the vcr's i named in Post #15?

Didn't you say you used a 6800 or 6200 series JVC? Those were pretty good VCR's, even if they didn't have a TBC (and frankly I wish I had a 6800; I think they were superior to later JVC's in some respects). The uTube version of the capture actually doesn't look that bad, but because of uTube's sloppy processing it is not an accurate impression of your original capture -- which likely is telecined. In any case I'd prefer JVC over a less reliable (and noisy) SONY. As for the tbc issue, there are ways to work around that if one becomes necessary.

Post some MediaInfo data first, and we can advise you how to get a decent sample without going through a nervous breakdown.

[nicknick]

The mediainfo is attached to this post.

How i capture:


- I use a JVC S6700EU VCR.
- Connected to my Pinnacle PCTV Pro capture card (WDM bt8x8 drivers, not the pinnacle/microsoft drivers).
- I use Virtualdub as capture software and i use the huffyuv video codec.

[DB83]

Except the captured bitrate is over 3 times larger than it should be.

And the audio is twice larger.

[sanlyn]

That won't matter at this point, although we need to tell nicknick how to fix it later. Now, we just need a sample of the capture.

Thanks for the data. If your output is intended to be standard definition DVD or AVCHD, etc., your video will have to be resized from 768x576 to 720x576 for PAL encoders. Don't worry about that at this point. In the future, you should capture at 720x576. If this movie is the same as that in your uTube sample, the image itself is a 4:3 aspect ratio. Your audio sampling rate is non-compliant for DVD, etc., but that can be fixed.

Here's how you can extract some video (7 or 8 seconds should be enough) of unprocessed, unaltered video from this capture:

1. Open the captured AVI in VirtualDub.

2. Use the edit icons at the bottom of the VDub window to cut about 8 seconds of video from your capture. If you don't know how to do this in VirtualDub, let us know.

3. With your video sample edited, then at the top VDub menu bar click "Video...", then click "direct stream copy". Do not omit this step.

4.Click "File...", then "Save as Avi...", give your sample file a location and name, and save it.

You can post the video in this forum using the "Upload files/Manage attachments" icon located just below the Reply window. When you click that icon you'll see the upload window where you tell the forum where your sample is located. Then click the "Upload" button', and wait for the sample file to download completely. It will take a while, but don't close that upload window until you see that the upload has completed.

[DB83]

I thought it might be worth fixing at this stage since we then get a longer sample (just in case). With the current offering 8 secs will still be > 100 meg

[nicknick]

I have attached the short clip.

[DB83]

I'll let others comment on the quality.

I just wonder why you are bothering with this particular film. It's 007 isn't it ?. Plenty of dvd and BR versions available and at the correct AR.

[nicknick]

I'll let others comment on the quality.

I just wonder why you are bothering with this particular film. It's 007 isn't it ?. Plenty of dvd and BR versions available and at the correct AR.

I have the dvd box-set and blu-ray box set.
Two reasons i chose this video.
1. Most home video's were recorded with a low quality camera, on a tape that was used quite a few times, i decided the best way to test the quality of the vcr and capture device is by taking a good quality vhs tape.
2. This tape was still in the vcr.


If you think it would be better to take a home video, then i could capture another clip.