80s VHS Possible Ghosting Issue?

[SupraGSX]

I believe what I'm seeing is referred to as ghosting. I have a crisp edge of any objects or text on the left of the image but its as though its smeared to the right. In clip1 its very evident when looking at the vents in the center of the dash. I Included clip2 because its easy to see the problem on that clip. Any good avisynth scripts to clean this up. Both clips are untouched .avi files. I will use qtgmc to deinterlace but didn't know if I needed to fix this before or after doing so. Thanks for any advice.

[johnmeyer]

The term ghosting is usually used to describe multipath interference on OTA analog TV.

I think "ringing" is the term for what you are seeing. You usually see it when there is sharp horizontal transition between dark and light.

This can sometimes happen if you forget to use the "edit switch" on your VCR before capturing. VCRs use a circuit which intentionally introduces ringing in order to improve the apparent sharpness. You always want to turn the switch on. This turns off the enhancement circuit.

If you can't go back and recapture, or if the ringing happens for some other reason, you can look at various dehalo and deringing scripts posted here and at doom9.org and see if they help.

Someone else may have some actual code they can post. My code snippets are oriented more towards chroma shifts and wouldn't work for your samples.

[SupraGSX]

I guess its possible I could attempt to recapture and ensure my 1980p is on edit but I believe it was. I don't like to handle these tapes much as they are extremely rare. They're known as the pluspy tapes there's a bunch of articles about them but long story short they contain illegal street racing and the Japanese government destroyed all the copies of them they could. Each time they're played you run the risk of of the deck eating them. Thanks for the response I'll look for some dering scripts see if they do anything to help.

[johnmeyer]

I wouldn't worry about damaging the tapes. I do movie film transfer all the time, as well as videotape transfers, and one thing that goes through my head almost every time I do the transfers is, "This is almost certainly the last time this movie/tape will ever be played." Put another way, NO ONE will every want to watch the videotape if the same material is available as an MP4, especially if you not only do a good transfer, but also "clean it up a bit."

Also, you don't have to transfer the entire tape. In fact, that would be a waste of time. Instead, transfer 30-60 seconds, and do so with different deck setting and/or different cables.

[SupraGSX]

That's very valid I guess instead of rare maybe I should have said valuable. I haven't seen a set sold in years but they were 5 thousand dollars a few years ago and of course would be worth more now. I'm trying to get a good transfer because these were never released on dvd and never will be and currently only very low quality versions are available on YouTube. Trying to preserve these as best I can but these artifacts are proving to be difficult. I can use a virtualdub filter called 2d cleaner and it works well at removing these but destroys the detail completely. Haven't found the sweet spot don't know if there is one. The first tape on this 2 tape set transfered great none of the ringing at all and the deck was on the same settings they were transferred back to back.

[johnmeyer]

$5,000 ?? I've never head of such a thing. Years ago I bought a laserdisc of "Songs of the South," a Disney film that offends current sensibilities, but which a client wanted. It was never released by Disney in any format except for laserdisc, and that was only sold in Japan. I paid about $300 for it.

$5,000. Wow.

How many tapes in the set? If it were 30-40 tapes, and if it was for a complete set, I guess that could push it up that high.

Of course if they really are that valuable, I'd take the opposite view: getting the best possible transfer would make your existing set even more valuable, should you sell it. I have done that on a few occasions: done a transfer; improved it; and then sell the transfer along with the original tapes. AFAIK, this is still copyright-legal, since the buyer gets the original tapes, and they buyer is willing to pay more because, of course, no one wants to play tapes if they don't have to.

[SupraGSX]

Technically 3, the first 2 show illegal street racing and third is track racing. The first 2 are the most notable. These were only available a very short amount of time in 1987. Pluspy is a car tuning shop and they made and sold these in their shop in kanagwa Japan. So they were never a mass produced item. They became famous because they were credited with being the genesis of drifting which is a common Japanese sport now. Also, for the driver they featured keiichi tsuchiya who is now known as the drift king. He was driving professionally and lost his racing license over participating in the films. They're just kind of iconic to niche of people.

[dvd3500]

Drifting... I lost interest when the Top Gear presenters had a guy teach a bunch of 70 year old women how to do it. Sure they aren`t as good as "pros" but I really only see a huge waste of fuel, tires and other resources. It really does not take a lot of skill to make tires spin and burn.
Drag racing is a close second but at least there is a lot of work going into making these stupidly powerful machines (my Dad drag raced) .

I prefer endurance road racing as it at least has a modicum of relevance to real cars and real driving. Formula 1 is full of itself and NASCAR has become a circus.

But to each his own as they say... I mean some people think Morris Dancing is fun and Britney Spears has talent ....

[SupraGSX]

I attempted to recapture and ensured I used the edit setting on the vcr. Made no difference still looking for something to help this if anyone can find a script. Thanks

[aramkolt]

Sorry to sort of revive an old thread, but does anyone think this could represent a Y/C Delay problem? Seems the shadows all occur to the right. Not sure if that is fixable in software or not or if you'd need to address that in capture using hardware that has a YC delay setting. Those settings were fairly common in rack mount TBCs made by DPS/Leitch.

[SupraGSX]

My problem with it has always been the fact that the left details are in the right place. So trying to use any chromashift filters or anything to unsmear the right side end up screwing the left side up. I've never found any good scripts for it. Unless jagabo or one of the other masters have a magic script to fix it I assume it's unrecoverable.

[davexnet]

There's a copy in the internet archive - is this better than yours?
https://archive.org/details/pluspy.

[themaster1]

If that can help here is one of the best deghosting scripts i came across in recent years
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/video-restore/10260-ghost-removal-filters.html#post66112

[SupraGSX]

There's a copy in the internet archive - is this better than yours?
https://archive.org/details/pluspy.

In some ways it's better it doesn't have the issue mine does but unfortunately the online version is interlaced progressive and I can't ever get the true 59.97fps back out of that, the motion vectors are destroyed. If I can fix the smearing on mine it'll be the better version.

[SupraGSX]

If that can help here is one of the best deghosting scripts i came across in recent years
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/video-restore/10260-ghost-removal-filters.html#post66112

I'll have to try this script thanks for the tip I'll report back results when I have a chance to work on it a little