Advice on a VHS transfer

[PuzZLeR]

Well in all fairness, as I've hinted in Post #35 here, and in other threads, and from personal experience, and to be relevant to the thread, all that post processing can have an effect on your overall disposition.

[usually_quiet]

Well in all fairness, as I've hinted in Post #35 here, and in other threads, and from personal experience, and to be relevant to the thread, all that post processing can have an effect on your overall disposition.

I think the behavior of the individual in question has gone past the point where it might be blamed on being temporary out of sorts from spending too many long nights in front of the computer trying to clean up problematic video. LOL

[Cherbette]

I somehow missed this drama. Lawd

[2Bdecided]

Well in all fairness, as I've hinted in Post #35 here, and in other threads, and from personal experience, and to be relevant to the thread, all that post processing can have an effect on your overall disposition.

To edit almost all of 1960 posts individually must take a lot of time and effort. It's hard to imagine being that angry about anything.

Cheers,
David.

[usually_quiet]

I somehow missed this drama. Lawd

Be glad you missed it.

[unclescoob]

Why was sanlyn banned from this site, can anyone tell me?

[Mr.Delusional]

It all started in this thread. https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/363156-Does-any-cheapo-HDMI-cable-suffice/page2

After that thread. He went through many many threads that he had posted in. And he edited his posts (old & newer threads) to say "wrong forum" or " "-30-"

He did that until he was banned I believe. Hopefully someone else will chime in.

[lordsmurf]

"30" is writer's shorthand for end of story. It's sanlyn himself doing this. He had a meltdown in another thread and started deleting posts to get back at this website in general because this place has too many "knuckle-draggers" who do not agree with his point of view in a number of areas. (I'm one of them.) ...or maybe its his way of saying he never should have joined a low-class forum like this one. At any rate, he decided to go and take his ball and bat with him.

That's shame, because he had some good stuff to say in years past. I wish people would not edit posts like this. It's the main reason we don't allow editing after 60 minutes at www.digitalFAQ.com. It happened once, years ago, and that was the end of "forever" editing.

sanlyn is a valued member there, and I hope he stays.

I agree, sometimes VH members have lower standards, and some are defensively stubborn about their cheap/easy/bad methods. But it's just a hobby site. Most people here want to learn from those of us that have experience and/or have worked in the various video fields. It would be rare to have heated disagreement between pros or serious hobbyists.

Note: I have no idea what the disagreement is about, so I'm not defending anybody's positions on anything.

[2Bdecided]

Note: I have no idea what the disagreement is about

The clue is in the title of the link: HDMI cables.

Cheers,
David.

[PuzZLeR]

I agree, sometimes VH members have lower standards, and some are defensively stubborn about their cheap/easy/bad methods. But it's just a hobby site. Most people here want to learn from those of us that have experience and/or have worked in the various video fields. It would be rare to have heated disagreement between pros or serious hobbyists.

Ahh, LordSmurf. Always the passionate and feisty one.

[usually_quiet]

"30" is writer's shorthand for end of story. It's sanlyn himself doing this. He had a meltdown in another thread and started deleting posts to get back at this website in general because this place has too many "knuckle-draggers" who do not agree with his point of view in a number of areas. (I'm one of them.) ...or maybe its his way of saying he never should have joined a low-class forum like this one. At any rate, he decided to go and take his ball and bat with him.

That's shame, because he had some good stuff to say in years past. I wish people would not edit posts like this. It's the main reason we don't allow editing after 60 minutes at www.digitalFAQ.com. It happened once, years ago, and that was the end of "forever" editing.

sanlyn is a valued member there, and I hope he stays.

I agree, sometimes VH members have lower standards, and some are defensively stubborn about their cheap/easy/bad methods. But it's just a hobby site. Most people here want to learn from those of us that have experience and/or have worked in the various video fields. It would be rare to have heated disagreement between pros or serious hobbyists.

Note: I have no idea what the disagreement is about, so I'm not defending anybody's positions on anything.

sanlyn is already banned, so he is definitely not staying. If you must know, the disagreement was about HDMI cables, sanlyn being alone in his views that only a few very special HDMI cables can deliver digital audio and digital video without altering the picture and sound.

[jagabo]

And the type of alterations he saw were patently impossible with HDMI cables: blurring, hue changes, brightness changes, ghosting, etc. He even admitted that you could show that the data was transmitted with 100 percent accuracy -- but that he could still see these differences.

[lordsmurf]

Ahh, LordSmurf. Always the passionate and feisty one.

And I should add that I come here to learn as well. As much as I know, I don't know everything. In recent years, this has been a good resource to delve further into the Avisynth rabbit hole, along with Doom9.

As far as the HDMI goes, some of the older cables (pre-rev1.3) do crap up things. I don't remember what anymore. I've been getting the 1.3 revision cables from Monoprice for years now, for under $5. I have a feeling facts were jumbled, some sarcastic posts were made in taunt (too common here sometimes), and it just devolved from there. Honestly, the thread is TL;DR, and missing posts make it somewhat incomprehensible anyway. I've missed video, and VH, for many months now. But I definitely don't miss that.

Oh well. Next topic...

[Deter]

Sanlyn went a-wall....Oh jesse haven't been around in a while. I do recall arguing over this just about stupid / terrible Michael Jackson video, he swore and tried for hours to fix this thing, no idea if he ever did fix it. Personally, didn't understand some of his methods but he for sure added to these forums. Sad to see him go, and to leave in this manner, wow...

[PuzZLeR]

Sanlyn went a-wall....Oh jesse haven't been around in a while. I do recall arguing over this just about stupid / terrible Michael Jackson video, he swore and tried for hours to fix this thing, no idea if he ever did fix it. Personally, didn't understand some of his methods but he for sure added to these forums. Sad to see him go, and to leave in this manner, wow...

Even behind all his "-30-"s I see the madness all this post processing can do.

https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/341917-remove-noise-and-block

And the type of alterations he saw were patently impossible with HDMI cables: blurring, hue changes, brightness changes, ghosting, etc. He even admitted that you could show that the data was transmitted with 100 percent accuracy -- but that he could still see these differences.

In Sanlyn's defense, I remember late nights trying to apply a fix on a certain capture, and remember going in to work still seeing spots and herringbone patterns all day. Really! So, I'm not surprised here if Sanlyn actually saw what he saw.

I'm not being sarcastic. It's true. It affects you in some way.

This is why now I keep it simple, now that I've learned the techniques I wanted to learn, and know when to stop. Even with NeatVideo, I use one noise profile and a couple of fixed scripts/filters (now copy and paste) and that's that. I've had it with the million tweaks that would follow (settings, and further grain, color, etc, filters...), which is the point of madness.

[Cherbette]

One day I shall return to this and finish it. I did think that the results were way too over filtered for my taste.

[jman98]

Why was sanlyn banned from this site, can anyone tell me?

Sanlyn was not banned. He got his panties in a wad and took his ball and left. I'm not sure that it's worth a lengthy explanation, but he made some claims that made no sense and got disproved and he was cut to the quick when that happened. He consistently engaged in behavior here that I felt was not rational. His editing of almost all his posts to remove his comments is the best example I can give as to why I felt that he was irrational and I felt this about him before he did all those edits.

[usually_quiet]

Why was sanlyn banned from this site, can anyone tell me?

Sanlyn was not banned. He got his panties in a wad and took his ball and left. I'm not sure that it's worth a lengthy explanation, but he made some claims that made no sense and got disproved and he was cut to the quick when that happened. He consistently engaged in behavior here that I felt was not rational. His editing of almost all his posts to remove his comments is the best example I can give as to why I felt that he was irrational and I felt this about him before he did all those edits.

Sure looks to me like sanlyn was banned as of early April. https://forum.videohelp.com/members/87697-sanlyn

I'm only guessing, but removing virtually all of one's thousands of posts might be enough to get banned, or maybe he asked to be removed as a member as the final step in the process of undoing everything.

[Cherbette]

Can anyone else point me in the direction of a filter that may be able to handle those herringbones? Neat seems to be cleaning up most everything except that....

[Cherbette]

Herringbone pattern is apparent - flaws inherent from VHS source and capture, or maybe analog cable (as mentioned) and some crosstalk on those reds and pinks (also as mentioned).

Looks like a job for a couple of resizes (down to 360x480 with precise bilinear then back up to 720x480 with lanczos to eliminate the crosstalk) and a strong dose of Neat Video with the temporal filter for that wavy noise.

Not perfect but, for it being the middle of the night here, it will do.

Source:

[Attachment 23947 - Click to enlarge]

Processed:

[Attachment 23948 - Click to enlarge]

Using a VCR with S-Video output, or a running the composite through a better comb filter could help the checkerboarding.

Are you suggesting a hardware solution? If so, what would you recommend?

Your results here look the most promising thus far. I'm just having a hard time re-producing it on my own lol. What settings did you use on Neat's temporal here?

[jagabo]

# interlaced or progressive video
BilinearResize(width/2, height)
LanczosResize(width*2, height)

I usually use nnedi3_rpow2() for the upscale:

# starting with progressive video
BilinearResize(width/2, height)
nnedi3_rpow2(2, cshift="Spline64resize",  fwidth=width*2, fheight=height)

Depending on the nature of the noise you can try different sizes and different resizing filters. You probably wouldn't want to do this with high resolution video. But since VHS barely has 320x480 resolution it doesn't really hurt.

[LMotlow]

Can anyone else point me in the direction of a filter that may be able to handle those herringbones? Neat seems to be cleaning up most everything except that....

First post, after browsing this forum for a few years. This Cher material keeps showing up every time I come here. It's always a mess. IMO you might be working yourselves into a frazzle for slim results.

I've used NeatVideo in many apps and NLE's since version 1.1, years ago. Great filter when not abused. But NeatVideo has no effect or very little effect on FM hash, herringbone, low-frequency or hum bars, edge ghosts, edge trails, streaky rainbows, ringing, jaggies, ragged or broken edges, etc. All are present in the samples. FM hash is tough. Like a garden parasite, it eats everything it covers. It doesn't move around much. If noise doesn't move, filters think it's not noise. Only filters I've used that can attack that stuff are the DeStripe script that I saw a member named poisondeathray post a long time back, or the VirtualDub frequency noise suppressor named fsn.vdf. Both were already tried here. Both will soften video and put what looks like a mild haze on it, but they do put the quietus on that noise. I think someone on doom9 said that DeFreq and FanFilter plugins will work, but I never saw it happen.

If VHS detail like this is 60% noise, the video won't look like BluRay after it's gone. Didn't look to me like it had that much detail to start with. Sorry to see the tape's in such sad shape. Looks like it would have been a cool Cher intro.

P.S.: sorry, Guess I botched posting the attachment, first time around. The mkv is from parts of scripts posted earlier. I notice the scripts are mostly gone now. Denoiser was vsn.vdf. Used NeatVideo only as a sharpener, since I was in VirtualDub anyway. I'd keep the NV noise and temporal filters turned off this time around, or you'll end up with banding.

[Cherbette]

well unfortunately these VHS captures from VH1 in the late 90's are pretty much all we have from this series. No official release. Probably never will be so...it's what I have to work with

[LMotlow]

Yep, that's VHS for you. Fighting my way through some pretty bad ones myself. Hope the FSN filter can help. It helped me clean 2 old tapes with similar problems, recorded off a bad cable signal. I used FFT3Dfilter in chroma-only to clean up the red rainbows and Camcorder Color Denoise to help with those "dancing" horizontal low-frequency lines. Good luck.

[Cherbette]

When using the FSN filter I seem to notice more horizontal lines in the filtered video that weren't in the signal before.

[LMotlow]

The hopping horizontal lines look like RF noise. Easy to spot. Look at the second camera shot, with the yellow background. VSN doesn't address those. It looks for grid patterns, like crosshatching, the same way RemoveStripes does. A temporal filter can clean up those lines. If you have the older scripts (gone now, but I made a copy back then) a temporal filter was used on it. I think it was TemporalSmoother, but that made things a touch too soft for me. With the original YUV sample I adapted jagabo's resize suggestion before hitting that video in VirtualDub. This code thinned those lines a bit and hit the red rainbows:

Spline16Resize(360,480)
MergeChroma(FFT3DFilter(bt=3,plane=3))
Spline64Resize(720,480)

In VirtualDub I used Camcorder Color Denoise. Looks like CCD almost wiped them out, but you can add some mild NeatVideo temporal set no higher than 1 at about 20%, or add VDub's temporalsmoother at low power. I set NeatVideo's sharpener to about 60 and turned down the other parts of its noise filters to something like 20% (I don't even think you need them at all), which is practically 0. The only place you can get a decent NeatVideo noise sample in that clip is from that yellow scene. There's any number of temporal filters you could use. It doesn't take much. My last step after YUV and VirtualDub was a script to re-einterlace and get back to YV12 and add some dither with GradFun2DB mod, and add some fine grain like the other scripts did -- or you'll get banding in that yellow shot.

I did kind of the same thing that those earlier scripts did, just didn't apply as many plugins or work on each scene with colors the way that other party did. That kind of detail work takes a little more patience than I have on hand right now. The only color filter I used was colorMill to pump saturation 5 or 6 points. I guess one could live without it.

[Cherbette]

Thanks I'll try some of those things and post a sample of what I get.

[LMotlow]

There must be a hundred ways to make variations in the original scripts. Seems to me like too many plugins were used. I just ran a quickie again of my own procs, and I think Avisynth's TemporalSmoother is probably better than that Camcorder plugin. But I'm at work on a laptop now. Can't see a darn thing on this old laptop monitor. I'll come back later and try a couple of things. Might be able to cut the filters down even more.

[Cherbette]

Where might I find that filter?

[jagabo]

Maybe he meant TTempSmooth()? Or the built in TemporalSoften() -- documented under SpacialSoften().