Vhs/DVD clarity question

[RWH]

Do we have a clip where the JVC VCR's TBC/NR was turned Off now?

I suspect you'll be forced to turn it on for the sake of the TBC anyway, just trying to make sure what's what.

Why not use the controls in grabber? Do you think it will cause problems? Maybe I misunderstood but I think vaporeon800 does this, while using VirtualDub to capture.

Correct. I open VirtualDub in capture mode, then open the One Touch Grabber app and use it to tweak the Proc Amp controls. The Hue control is futile and should be left at neutral (128). Sharpness should be set to 0 because higher values add edge enhancement. Brightness and Contrast are useful, as is Saturation to a small degree.

Using VirtualDub to change the Proc Amp is annoying with every capture device anyway since opening that menu disables the video display; One Touch Grabber takes the place of GraphEdit for being able to tweak the controls and see VirtualDub's realtime display in the VC500's case.

VirtualDub Capture mode then open One Touch Grabber. Click on the yellow gear. The settings should be there.

[jagabo]

what adjustments are you referring to

He's talking about the video proc(essing) amp(lifier) adjustments. Unfortunately, VirtaulDub doesn't give you a live view of the changes as you move the sliders. You have to move them, then close the dialog to see the results.

There is a way that usually works to get a live preview (depending on the capture device and its drivers). It involves opening the capture device driver in GraphStudio, then adjusting the proc amp controls from there -- while VirtualDub is running in preview mode. As you move the sliders in GraphStudio you can see the preview in VirtualDub changing. Someone who has the same capture device may be able to give you the name of the capture device driver to select in GraphStudio. Basically, you start GraphStudio, select Graph -> Insert Filter. Locate the video capture driver in the left portion of the list and press the Insert button. Close that dialog then back at the main GraphStudio window right click on the driver box and select Properties (I think that's right). Navigate to the Proc Amp tab to access the proc amp sliders.

https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/345350-VHS-Restoration?p=2156152&viewfull=1#post2156152

[Oldretiredguy]

Here is the first Hawaii capture.

Video:
Frame size, fps (µs per frame): 720x480, 29.970 fps (33367 µs)
Length: 717 frames (0:23.92)
Decompressor: Huffyuv v2.1.1 - CCESP Patc... (HFYU)
Number of key frames: 717
Min/avg/max/total key frame size: 223580/249451/278376 (174665K)
Min/avg/max/total delta size: (no delta frames)
Data rate: 59809 kbps (0.01% overhead)

Audio:
Sampling rate: 48000Hz
Channels: 2 (Stereo)
Sample precision: 16-bit
Compression: PCM (Uncompressed)
Layout: 18 chunks (1.37s preload)
Length: 1148477 samples (0:23.92)
Min/avg/max/total frame size: 137460/255217/262144 (4487K)
Data rate: 1536 kbps (0.01% overhead)

[Oldretiredguy]

I have been reading back through the last few postings by all you guys. I'm getting confused because you are talking between yourselves and it's going over my head. Am I supposed to be following all of what you folks are talking about doing? I know you all know what you are talking about but I don't know what you are talking about. So, if I am slow to respond it's because I keep having to pull my head out of my ass. And it's getting sore from beating it against the wall.

R

[Oldretiredguy]

[QUOTE=vaporeon800;2287365]Do we have a clip where the JVC VCR's TBC/NR was turned Off now?

I suspect you'll be forced to turn it on for the sake of the TBC anyway, just trying to make sure what's what.

The clip I just sent is with the TBC/NR turned off.


R

[sanlyn]

I have been reading back through the last few postings by all you guys. I'm getting confused because you are talking between yourselves and it's going over my head. Am I supposed to be following all of what you folks are talking about doing? I know you all know what you are talking about but I don't know what you are talking about. So, if I am slow to respond it's because I keep having to pull my head out of my ass. And it's getting sore from beating it against the wall.

R

I get what you mean. If you don't know what we're talking about and you don't see that we've specifically addressed you concerning the subject, don't worry about it. A lot of this gibberish is about stuff that we notice but will have to handle later.

[Oldretiredguy]

Ok, just grab me by calling my name and I will know you are talking to me.

R

[RWH]

Oldretiredguy

Forget about proc amp stuff for now. I'll put some pics together with a good description.

Capture the same video as close as you can with TBC/NR ON. Upload the same part. Then we can compare and see which is better.

You can open up 2 copies of VirtualDub. Open a different clip in each one. Right click in one of the video frames and select zoom 400%. When you zoom-in it exaggerates any problems.

Downloading Hawaii new capture 1.avi now.

[RWH]

Oldretiredguy

When your ready, try this. Open up VirtualDub. File > Capture Avi. Then open up the One Touch Grabber program. Click the yellow gear, that should open up the settings window. With those sliders you can adjust settings while you are capturing. See Post #260 and #271. If this works for you, you will be able to make adjustments while watching the capture. VirtualDub has 2 controls Post #261, but you can't adjust them while watching the capture. I wish I could do a better job explaining.

[Oldretiredguy]

Thank you RWH for being so descriptive. I will try to do what you have said. But it will take me a while to try to figure it out. I don't know if I will have it tonight but I will try. Oh God, my brain is on fire.

Ray

[RWH]

Oldretiredguy

I hope you don't feel rushed in any way. Most of these guys are all over this forum and probably others. I will remain subscribed to this thread. Until somebody gets sick of me I'll stick around. I'm learning too, I do have a little background in this stuff but nowhere near as technical as these guys. I'm doing what I can to simplify the techie terms. I'm off work for another month or so, and getting snowed in. This is keeping me from going crazy

I think your doing just fine. Right now you could get a decent capture of a clean tape. There are so many details. Lot's of simple things. Lot's and lot's.

Just got the latest Hawaii in.

[sanlyn]

We might be moving around a little too quickly for Ray. Let's take it more slowly, and try not to delete any steps. To start, I don't believe Ray understands what "image controls" are, nor why they are used, and apps like GraphStudio must sound like something from another galaxy. Also, he's not accustomed yet to viewing graphics more critically. Perhaps we should spend more time on the captures he's already submitted.

For another thing, if he's using a laptop he's working at a visual disadvantage. Typical laptop graphics hardware has neither the firepower nor the tonal or rendering preciision of PC graphics. Laptop screens are notoriously poor at rendering clear shadow detail, and all of them that I have seen tend to treat small objects directly in the center of the midtones in a way that makes those objects almost disappear.

I agree with RWH: you should probably be using DNR/TBC turned "on" most of the time with the home-made tapes. They're pretty noisy and are showing signs of deterioration. Also, it's better to capture the same scenes again after making major changes in settings and trying them out -- otherwise, you have nothing to directly compare between the two results.

Tomorrow I'll try to post a few images from your captures to show as examples of some problems you should recognize, with notes on what can usually be done about them.

[Brad]

How about going back to Hawaii?

LOL, I initially read this as you suggesting that Ray hop a plane and record a new vacation instead of bothering with all this.

opening the capture device driver in GraphStudio

This won't work because only Brightness/Contrast are accessible through the Capture Filter. Somehow, the included One Touch Grabber app provides access to all of the controls and uses a more sensible 0-255 scale (instead of 0-9984 where the picture only changes in steps of 39).

[sanlyn]

I agree, but you can do a lot with Contrast and Brightness. It's all I use most of the time. I do have a PA-1 proc amp, but it doesn't behave well when the tape is copy protected; it places some noise on the top and bottom borders with some flavors of Macrovision. I developed workarounds for it but it's a hassle and frankly the luma levels are all I use on it anyway -- that luma meter is a big help in figuring out what's going on.

Speaking of all these controls, I re-read the entire thread late last night. Unfortunately oldretiredguy is really starting from scratch with this video stuff. I think we should drop back to helping him pick up some very basic concepts. I'm still working on some sample frame caps from his latest uploads, will finish those later today. But first, with the forum's indulgence:

TBC (Time Base Corrector) PART 1: I'm certain that when we say "Turn the TBC on" or "Turn the TBC off", Ray has no idea what a TBC is. If we explain that it means "Time Base Corrector", that doesn't make much sense because he doesn't know anything about the nature of VHS tape. One doesn't need an engineer's level of expertise about this stuff, but some things are really basic.

Several years ago I had to repair a three-hour video of a championship college football game for one of my nephews who had just graduated. The tape was in horrible condition. I mean horrible. He wanted to know why it was taking 5 weeks to get a DVD. So I spent one day making a quickie demo tape to show him the problems. This demo was made several years ago. I've learned a few things since, so don't expect Hollywood quality here (it's NTSC 352x480). I edited that 37-minute demo today down to less than 5 minutes. It includes some simple graphics, some text, and no audio. Do you need to know this? Well, if you don't know how problems develop or what a TBC is, then...yes, you do.

Basically the demo explains what VHS tape looks like and how it gets messed up. First, the demo explains how VHS appears to a tape player. The image below is a simplified diagram of how video is recorded to tape. The top portion of the tape surface (which has the tiny clocks on it) is where timing pulses, audio, and other info are recorded. The lower portion of the image shows how the video frames are recorded. Most people think that the image recording is a single linear path along the tape. But it isn't. Video is recorded in diagonal "stripes" along the tape. The tape heads read those stripes and translate electrical impulses into pictures, frame by frame:


[Attachment 21911 - Click to enlarge]

When a tape is played with the average player, lots of things go wrong. The frames don't show up at the capture device "on time", and neither do scan lines within the frames. Two types of Time Base Correctors are used for these problems. Do these problems show up in the recorded video? They most certainly do.

Below, an image from the demo of how a full-frame TBC works. It corrects the uneven timing of output frames and sends them out at a regular and correct frame rate:

[Attachment 21912 - Click to enlarge]

The other type of TBC is a line-level TBC. It corrects the output timing of individual scan lines within a frame so that all of the lines in each individual frame are output at the same time:

[Attachment 21913 - Click to enlarge]

The demo is rather primitive technically (sorry, but I was a complete newcomer myself), but it shows in a simplified manner what effects these timing problems can inflict during playback and capture.

[sanlyn]

TBC (Time Base Corrector) PART 2: An example of damaged crappy noisy VHS tape recorded off TV. The first "bad"sample is how the tape looked when recorded without a TBC or level fixes or any effort at repair. It's not just a matter of severe flagging at the top of the frames, but a matter of some really ugly noise. The "bad" demo has the frame reduced slightly so that all of the damage can be seen without any of it being hidden by overscan on a CRT.

The "fixed" sample is the first cleanup effort, with a Toshiba RD-XS34 used as line tbc pass-thru. Since then I've obtained an ES15 with a heftier TBC. So you will still see some slight residual disturbance at the very top border pixels. Overscan usually hides it. The "fixed" sample shows not only how top flagging was relieved, but how the image has an overall more stable flow. The only denoiser I used was NeatVideo in this first effort, but later I used Avisynth to make a few more repairs. So the final looks even better, but it was encoded at 720x480 rather than 352x480 half-frame. I also had a JVC 7600 with TBC at the time, but it killed too much detail and it repeatedly rejected this damaged tape.

If you view these videos on a laptop, the screen won't show nearly all of the damage or cleanup.

This image shows the first recording (left) and the initial fixed version (right):

[Attachment 21915 - Click to enlarge]

[Oldretiredguy]

RWH, here is the second clip with the TBC/NR turned back on. I tried to get as close to the same frames as possible.

[Oldretiredguy]

To all who are trying to learn me something,,I have come up with an analogy for my situation. I feel like you guys have given me a stack of lumber and a hammer and saw and have told me to go build a house. WTF??? Where do I start? Ha ha, LOL.

R

[Oldretiredguy]

Oldretiredguy

I'm off work for another month or so, and getting snowed in. This is keeping me from going crazy



Just got the latest Hawaii in.

RWH, you need to move west. It's in the 60's here and a beautiful day. I can't believe I'm sitting in my office doing what I'm doing. I should be outside doing something productive, as my wife tells me. Oh well, everybody has to live somewhere. We love Michigan. It has a lot to offer if you stay away from the big cities. We have friends that live about a mile inland from Lake Huron on 11 acres. Beautiful for a few months of the year.

R

[RWH]

Pretty cool sanlyn

Would it be reasonable to suggest this to Oldretiredguy? Hook the VCR up to the best TV he has. Play the tape he want's to capture, and use the button on the front of the machine to determine what looks best to him.

edit I see he posted another clip now we can compare

[RWH]

Oldretiredguy

Michigan can be pretty cool, heck right now it's 16 degrees. 10 with wind chill factor. I have good reasons to stay inside.

[sanlyn]

Saving AVI files in VirtualDub:

Here's a little something (also rather basic) that you might have figured out already, but in case you wondered.....below is a list of your AVI upload samples so far. The list shows the name, the file size, and the video playing time. I had to make this list a [CODE] block so things would stay formatted like a list:

Hawaii.avi                  24.3 sec  137.6 MB
Test.avi                    17.0 sec  122.5 MB
Danny Ganz test.avi         29.1 sec  156.8 MB
Danny Ganz 3 test.avi       17.8 sec  111.0 MB
Danny Ganz 4 clip test.avi   1.5 sec   47.9 MB
Danny Ganz 6.1 test.avi     13.5 sec  413.6 MB
Hawaii new capture 1.avi    23.9 sec  179.2 MB

Do you notice that the Danny Ganz 6 AVI in blue is the biggest file in the bunch? Yet it's the second shortest file in duration, by far, at only 13.5 seconds. The reason for that is the way it was saved in VirtualDub. By default, VDub uses "Full processing mode". In that mode, it converts video to RGB color if it isn't already RGB to begin with. It's default colorspace on output is RGB24. The default compression mode is "None". So what happened? The original capture sample started out as YUY2 color and losslessly compressed with huffyuv. On output, the VDub default output settings were still set and the video was converted to RGB24 uncompressed AVI -- making the output file almost 3 times bigger than it was as input.

Don't get all tangled up in colorspaces just yet. But keep these points in mind:
-most flavors of YV12 color use less video data than some other color methods. YV12 is used for DVD encoding.
-YUY2 stores more color information than YV12 does -- therefore, a somewhat larger file but not by a huge percentage.
-RGB stores more color information and in a different way than YV12 or YUY2.
-Uncompressed video is, of course, not compressed.

That's a gross oversimplification, but that's the way it works. How many people make that mistake now and then when saving results in VirtualDub? Answer: everyone!

[Oldretiredguy]

Sanlyn, when I capture a video and want to save it what should the steps be? Or do I have to save it once it has a capture title? What am I doing wrong/right? If I have it wrong, please let me know what to do/not to do. This is all so confusing yet but I think I am miles ahead of where I was a week ago. Thanks again.

R

[sanlyn]

Once you have a capture file, it's already "saved". Don't change it. The only thing that will change is when you take part of it, clean it up with filters or cut out a section you want to keep, etc. The extracted section is what will be saved to another file. You haven't reached the processing stage yet. The only "processing" you've done is to cut a small section of a capture and save that little edit. For our purposes here, we want to see that upload with the same structure and format that it was captured in.

When you cut a section from your capture, this is the setting to use in VirtualDub:
In the "Video" drop-down menu, select "direct stream copy".
Then "Save As AVI...".
That's all you have to do.

[Oldretiredguy]

I'm using VirtualDub to do all my capturing. How else would I do it? Maybe using Grabber? Not sure about all this. I know I'm dense but my old head had acquired thickness over the years.

R

[Brad]

I don't understand why there is still so much temporal ghosting in the clip with TBC/NR off.

[sanlyn]

I'm using VirtualDub to do all my capturing. How else would I do it? Maybe using Grabber? Not sure about all this. I know I'm dense but my old head had acquired thickness over the years.

You can't capture to lossless AVI with Grabber.

[sanlyn]

I don't understand why there is still so much temporal ghosting in the clip with TBC/NR off.

Do you mean the Ganza #6 AVI? It looks as if TBC was on in that one, but maybe it's on the tape.

The newer Hawaii doesn't seem to have have it on, but that tape is in bad need of a line tbc. Ray hasn't learned to spot a great many artifacts yet, but the edges are wiggling and bristling like crazy and there are ripples, smearing and object shimmer with motion. It looks like s-video was used for that Hawaii clip (thank goodness). I've been playing with that one today and making some frame captures to use later. At least it otherwise looks better than the Ganza clip.

[Oldretiredguy]

This morning I switched to another s-video cable and tested it. So both of the clips today are with a s-video cable. I have just been messing around with both clips open in two sessions of VirtualDub. I have now edited the two clips to just about the exact same spots both beginning and ending. I am happy that I now know how to do that. They both seem to be 385 frames in length.

R

[sanlyn]

Good work. Learning abut this is a matter of using it, asking questions, and reading up on stuff. At least you only have to learn it once.

[Oldretiredguy]

I'm thinking that maybe I should go back to the virtualdub documentation and finish reading it. I keep getting sidetracked and I haven't gotten any reading done. I am going to go back and read through this thread again too. It is getting pretty long. I'm wondering if we should start a new one. What say you all?

R