Poor quality with ADVC-300

[Dario77]

Hi guys

Hope someone could help me out.

I recently bought a ADVC-300 and installed it via Firmwire to my computer.
I hooked it up to my VCR, (JVC DR-MV) and I was good to go- at least thats what I tought.

The output from the ADVC-300 is in really poor quality. The pixles are wavy and a bit blurry.
I´ll try to put a printscreen of it here:


[Attachment 64065 - Click to enlarge]

I´ve tried with many different vhs-cassettes, but ending up with a poor quality.
What do I do wrong?

My only setting on the ADVC-300 is that I put it on PAL-mode, which is correct.


Best regards

D.

[DB83]

Upload, as an attachment, a short sample recording.

BTW Did your ADVC come with the user manual and the CD that contains a useful program.

[DB83]

As for the manual and/or software do read this topic.

https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/351942-advc-300

[Skiller]

Pretty sure others will chime in on this as well; I'm afraid to tell you you bought a flawed device. The ADVC-300 is flawed and overpriced with lots of issues.

That being said, your screenshot doesn't look too bad for a VHS capture as far as I can see. Maybe you are expecting too much of 46 years old VHS technology. Plus you are not using a TBC, so "wavyness" is ought to be there.

[DB83]

Well as a ADVC 300 user (see my replies in the above link) the unit is not perfect but for VHS always out-performed what I was initially capturing without it.

Let's not see LS blood-pressure rise whether this has a quasi-TBC or not

[Dario77]

First off, thank you for the quick answers - really appreciate it!

I bought it without a CD and manual. It's just the machine.
But I´ve read the whole manual online and followed the suggested settings. (only PAL, the other in default mode)

I´ve a attached a great summervibe from Daryl Braithwaite.

Yes, lets not discuss if its real TBC or not. What Im curoius about is the fact that I´ve seen som great captures with just the ADVC-300 and that
is why I dont really get it, why I got this problem.

Skiller, your point taken, that some of the VHS-cassettes are 30+ years old.

[Skiller]

The main issue I see in your sample is dirty video heads. Those white and black short horizontal lines are exactly what dirty video heads look like and there is lots. Your VCR needs it's video heads cleaned.
Apart from that and too much chroma saturation the capture is good.

[dellsam34]

The output from the ADVC-300 is in really poor quality. The pixles are wavy and a bit blurry.

Judging it's poor quality based on what? Have you captured the same tape on another capturing workflow? Have you hooked up the VCR to the TV and noticed a big quality difference? If not then you may want to do that first and make a reasonable judgment.
From the sample video posted I see a low end VCR with probably worn heads, oversaturated and noisy contents recorded from a noisy broadcast TV or a 3 gen dub from those small operation dub houses. The ADVC-300 is not to blame here, it's doing the best it can.

[sum_guy]

I took your summer.avi file and ran it through some filters with Virtualdub2, If I was really serious about fixing this a lot could be done using Avisynth or Hyrbrid.

https://files.videohelp.com/u/84671/Summer.mp4

[Alwyn]

I took your summer.avi file and ran it through some filters with Virtualdub2,

No point in posting that if you don't tell us what filters you used!

[dellsam34]

I took your summer.avi file and ran it through some filters with Virtualdub2, If I was really serious about fixing this a lot could be done using Avisynth or Hyrbrid.

https://files.videohelp.com/u/84671/Summer.mp4

How did you manage to make it 100 times worse?

[dvd3500]

I never understand the hate the ADVC 300 gets... For a casual user who has to jump between NTSC and PAL I find it more than adequate.
I got mine on a close out sale so while it was higher than other capture devices I didn't think it was horrible.
In fact, of all the devices I tried it was the only one that maintained audio synch even on bad copies of entire movies.

Of course there are better things out there but are they readily available to average user...?

Definitely better than those composite to HDMI things out there.

[Sharc]

The main issue I see in your sample is dirty video heads. Those white and black short horizontal lines are exactly what dirty video heads look like and there is lots. Your VCR needs it's video heads cleaned.
Apart from that and too much chroma saturation the capture is good.

Unless I am missing something, the interlaced capture (BFF) seems to have the 2 fields taken from the same point in time. They can be matched with TFM() but I don't think that's the idea of a sane interlaced capture. Maybe its a flaw of the ADVC300, I don't know.

Attempt of a fix:

FFVideoSource("Summer.avi")
SwapFields()
TFM(PP=0)
SmoothTweak(saturation=0.60,HQ=true)
SpotLess(ThSAD=600,bBlur=0.50)
KNLMeansCL(d=2,h=2.00,device_type="gpu",device_id=0)
McDegrainSharp()

[Skiller]

I noticed that too. But this is not unusual for analog video. It's not a serious issue. It could have been edited or recorded that way or it could be that the ADVC caused it – after all DV needs to be Bottom Field First and there are only two ways to archive this off a TFF source: shift the fields temporally by one field (which is what we are seeing, we just don't know where it happened) or shift the entire video spatially up or down by one scanline.

Long story short, field matching fixes this, but if there are any field based edits done to this video there would still be parts that are truly interlaced with 50 distinctive fields. Also any tape drop outs are always interlaced.


@ sum_guy
Sorry, I agree with dellsam34, it looks a lot worse.

The fix lies in the VCR. There is no point in trying to fix this capture in software, imo (except for the oversaturated chroma).

[Sharc]

The fix lies in the VCR. There is no point in trying to fix this capture in software, imo (except for the oversaturated chroma).

Well I tried and at least got some improvement, see previous post. I didn't apply any postprocessing to fix residual combed frames or true interlaced portions. So it could be further improved if need be, I think. But a good capture would come first of course.

[jagabo]

Needs more but here's a start:

AviSource("Summer.avi") 
SwapFields() # fields stored in the wrong position
TFM() # back to progressive film frames
Santiag() # reduce residual combing from horizontal time base wiggle

Tweak(sat=0.5) # white balance
ConvertToRGB()
RGBAdjust(rb=-16, gb=-8)
RGBAdjust(r=225.0/249.0, b=215.0/183.0)
ConvertToYV12()
ColorYUV(gain_y=30, off_y=-2)
Tweak(sat=1.4)

McTemporalDenoise(settings="high") # temporal/spacial noise reduction

[sum_guy]

Vapoursynth tweak,
ttempsmooth
despot
spotless

https://files.videohelp.com/u/84671/summer.mp4

[Alwyn]

That's better, sum_guy!

[Alwyn]

Jagabo, I should have said yours is very good. One thing I noticed was the way you brought out the colours; the blue sky and the white woodwork. Your colours are just much more vibrant and defined (and I don't mean in the saturation sense).

Was that achieved by a part of your script or is it s result of "the whole package", as it were?

[jagabo]

Jagabo, I should have said yours is very good. One thing I noticed was the way you brought out the colours; the blue sky and the white woodwork. Your colours are just much more vibrant and defined (and I don't mean in the saturation sense).

Was that achieved by a part of your script or is it s result of "the whole package", as it were?

The color adjustments were from the two tweaks and everything between them. The first Tweak() reduced the saturation so that the subsequent conversion to RGB wouldn't blow out the RGB values. The first RGBAdjust() was to adjust the black levels. The second RGBAdjust() was to adjust the white levels. The result was converted back to YV12 then the last Tweak() boosted the saturation back up a bit. The RGB gamma probably could use some adjusting too. That might make the skin tones a little better. But the video didn't have much in the mid greys to use as a guide.

[Alwyn]

Thanks Jagabo, this is a great example of the three tiers of restoration: raw capture, Virtual Dub and Avisynth.

[Sharc]

The capture should have been better to begin with. I don't know at which stage the the colors and interlaced structure have been messed up, driving the colors partially even beyond legal YUV (YCbCr) values (e.g. the sunset scene with V(Cr)=255 clipped) - not to mention legal RGB. Now one can only try to fix it.
It looks to me like the original source has been edited by some tool (applying cuts, transitions, maybe intentional 'artistic' color tweaks as some people prefer highly saturated colors and a reddish sunset tint .....). Perhaps the OP knows more about it.

[Alwyn]

Here's my effort, solely using Virtual Dub (I cheated on the noise reduction! )

I'm not very good on the VDub X264 encoder; I couldn't work out how to get a 720x576 4:3 export so I used 768x576.

[sum_guy]

I'm not very good on the VDub X264 encoder

Came out pretty for just using Vdub, nice work

[jagabo]

Here's my effort, solely using Virtual Dub

The video isn't really interlaced. It's progressive PAL with fields out of phase and their position swapped (the top field is below the bottom field). In VirtualDub start with the Field Swap filter to fix the field positions, then add the Field Delay (TFF to BFF) filter to realign the fields to get the frames progressive. That works for almost all frames up to 573. After that the video starts jumping between swapped and not swapped fields. What it really needs is an adaptive swapper and field matcher.

What the OP really needs is a better VCR, a line TBC, and a full frame TBC. And a video processing amp or maybe a capture device with an built in proc amp.

[Alwyn]

Thanks Jagabo, that's a little over my head. How did you work out the issues with my video?

I couldn't open my attempt in my NLE so did some more investigating and found that the x264vfw encoder was the culprit (VideoRedo "fixed" it so I could open it); when I used the VDub 2 internal x264 encoder, I could open the result OK. Would my initial dud x264vfw encode have caused the issues you identified?

[Sharc]

With all due respect for the various color tweaks: To my eyes the singers look partially like suffering from a lack oxygen. Maybe the singing is just too arduous

[Alwyn]

To my eyes the singers look partially like suffering from a lack oxygen.

Similar to mine when a see a dozens of lines of AVISynth code!

[jagabo]

Thanks Jagabo, that's a little over my head. How did you work out the issues with my video?

The problems I was referring to were in the source. I was just pointing out that deinterlacing wasn't the best way to handle it.

[lordsmurf]

Pretty sure others will chime in on this as well; I'm afraid to tell you you bought a flawed device. The ADVC-300 is flawed and overpriced with lots of issues.

Correct.

Plus you are not using a TBC, so "wavyness" is ought to be there.

Line TBC. Use it.

Maybe you are expecting too much of 46 years old VHS technology.

Not accurate. There have been many changes to VHS over the years. What existed in 1976 isn't what we used in the 80s, 90s, or 00s.

From the sample video posted I see a low end VCR with probably worn heads, oversaturated and noisy contents recorded from a noisy broadcast TV or a 3 gen dub from those small operation dub houses. The ADVC-300 is not to blame here, it's doing the best it can.

The ADVC-300 is easily partly to blame. It takes bad source, and just makes it worse.

I never understand the hate the ADVC 300 gets...

Simple. The ADVC-300 filters are "always on" and make quality worse. Often much worse. The 50/55/100/110 models are better. Still DV, so blah quality, blocky, color loss. But not messy like the 300.

For a casual user who has to jump between NTSC and PAL I find it more than adequate.

And some folks find Ramen noodles a perfectly acceptable meal, for every meal. Of course, it has no nutrition, awful crap to eat.

Of course there are better things out there but are they readily available to average user...?

Yes.

Definitely better than those composite to HDMI things out there.

Like comparing a cat turd to a dog turd. Which is better? Who cares? Both are turds.