Which of these two different ways of capturing analogue video is best?

[lollo]

In the meantime you can capture some "representative" segments (deep blacks, high whites) and check the behaviour of your chain analizyng the captured levels with AviSynth or else

[Marvolo]

Yes, no control then. Some "HDMI stream right into the BM capture card" user may chime in to support you...

That would either be @Bogilein or @Skiller as they're the authors of this capture method.

Probably it's expected to put some external brightness/contrast controller somewhere in the chain between Capture Card and Panasonic player.

Then again... Let's assume I just went for the DV files. Capturing DV apparently gives you no controls over brightness and contrast levels either. It's just being captured what's on the tape. So if I went for the DV files, I'd have to live with clipped levels too, right? So I guess I can just ignore them now too.

[Sharc]

Yes, no control then. Some "HDMI stream right into the BM capture card" user may chime in to support you...

That would either be @Bogilein or @Skiller as they're the authors of this capture method.

Probably it's expected to put some external brightness/contrast controller somewhere in the chain between Capture Card and Panasonic player.

Then again... Let's assume I just went for the DV files. Capturing DV apparently gives you no controls over brightness and contrast levels either. It's just being captured what's on the tape. So if I went for the DV files, I'd have to live with clipped levels too, right? So I guess I can just ignore them now too.

Yes. Especially as your captures are not off the kilter. No sleepless nights

[lollo]

When you "transfer" a miniDV tape is just a bit-by-bit copy of what is there.
When you use a Camera as digitizer have little/no control, except addign an external procamp into the analog path.

The levels in your Analog to DV capture "Seq1_amarec.avi" are ok. No deep blacks or high withes, related probably to the nature of the scene.



What is imortant is that you do not have accumulations (i.e. high spikes) in the histograms ranges 0-16 and 250-255 levels, where the cards, more or less, start to cut.

[DB83]

FTR (For the record) that later sample kinda 'fooled' me since Amarectv does NOT do DV (and I guess that most on here knew that).

But then most on here would also not use vdub/2 to 'transfer' DV.


And whilst we are still 'feeling in the dark' my own guess is that the OP uses a D8 camcorder to send the video via firewire and thus transfer DV.


But the bottom line is that the huffyuv capture is little different to the 'uncompressed' so why even waste that bitrate ? True that the color subsampling is better in the huffy but in PAL land is the difference worth it ?

[Marvolo]

And whilst we are still 'feeling in the dark' my own guess is that the OP uses a D8 camcorder to send the video via firewire and thus transfer DV.

I do use a Sony D8 camcorder, but not to create DV files. The DV files I posted here as reference are the ones which were created by some professional capturing service in 2008. I have no idea what kind of equipment or capture chain they were using.

All I'm doing here is feeding the D8 camcorder via S-Video and audio-composite into my Panasonic EH575 and from there via HDMI into the Blackmagic Intensity Pro to capture in HuffYUV / lossless, 8bit 4.2:2.

[DB83]

Well if you did not do the DV captures then just stick with them. But then any truly pro service would not use vbub/2 to transfer the tapes.

What you should now realise is that there is little real (eyesight-wise) difference between DV and lossless. By all means capture lossless ( not that quasi 'uncompressed') for archive purposes since you may wish to come back to the footage at a later date to 'improve' based on avisynth.


Indeed it was previously mentioned that potential viewers do not give a 'toss' about method as long as they can see them. Many moons ago I 'wasted' many an hour to create good menus for dvd that I would distribute to those with the same interest as mine. Did they really care as long as they saw the main video ?

[poisondeathray]

Not sure why the DV version would have this horizontal glitch near the center , but the new uncompressed transfer does not. If it was a problem on the tape, I would expect it on both versions

These use bob() - essentially a field resized to a frame . If you check a few fields before/after, no similar glitch appears on the uncompressed version

(It's not a DV decoder issue; I checked a few different ones)

[johnmeyer]

There is one exception. Nine years ago Sony Pictures wanted to use some of my film clips under the opening credits for the Will Smith movie "Concussion."

This sounds interesting. What kind of clips were they and how come Sony Pictures knew of them / wanted them? Did you film professionally and made it accessible to the public?

My father filmed my high school football games back in the late 1960s, using his Bell & Howell Super 8 camera. When he got tired of the football game (and when I wasn't on the field), he filmed a little of the sideline action. When I got around to transferring all of his films, I used all of this "b-roll" and created a music video:

1960s OPRFHS Cheerleaders & Football Music Video

As you can see, I posted that on YouTube. Sony had hired a firm to search for and then license clips like mine. They showed my clips to the director who, I was told, fell in love with them.

I just finished another licensing deal two days ago, this time for PBS. It is for film which I transferred for two different friends.

Kiddieland

Much to my surprise, PBS was able to pay close to half the commercial rate that I got from Sony. All of this money will go to the copyright holders (i.e., my friends).

I mentioned this in passing but it bears repeating: how many people will watch these tapes and, as a corollary, how many people will watch all of the tapes, and how many will watch them more than once?

I widely agree with what you wrote about the value of technical perfection of tons of digital heritage of family memories.
But as the OP wanted to strive for the "better" I added my comparison in post#51 with a grain of salt as another discouragement against routinely re-capturing his stuff, possibly just trading in the faint DCT artifacts of his existing DV to slightly crushed superbrights and superblacks. Or just be aware of it.

I absolutely want the OP, and everyone else, to get the most perfect capture possible. If he were starting from scratch, I wouldn't be quite as negative.

However, having said that if, after spending days and days trying to get a capture to work, only to find that frames are being dropped and that the process may not be reliable, I would still advise going back to the "bulletproof" DV capture, although I sure would never use VirtualDub, but instead would recommend Scenalyzer as the capture software.

[Marvolo]

Not sure why the DV version would have this horizontal glitch near the center , but the new uncompressed transfer does not. If it was a problem on the tape, I would expect it on both versions

Probably it was just a glitch produced by the camcorder that was used for capturing the DV files. As we know, different camcorders yield different playback results. So I wouldn't expect that every playback comes back identical to a previous one, even IF the same camcorder for playback was used, which here is clearly not the case.

That said, I noticed that I seem to be having some problems with a certain tape where the audio keeps cutting off for a couple frames and the DV capture clearly doesn't. All I can do there is to copy the DV-audio for that section over the missing one. Apparently, my own camcorder doesn't like that tape as much as the DV camcorder back in 2008 did.

[Marvolo]

However, having said that if, after spending days and days trying to get a capture to work, only to find that frames are being dropped and that the process may not be reliable, .

Well, I was under the impression that we or I have resolved the issues about dropped frames now that I've started using AmaRecTV for capturing. So...

[Marvolo]

As you can see, I posted that on YouTube. Sony had hired a firm to search for and then license clips like mine. They showed my clips to the director who, I was told, fell in love with them.

And you sent the original Super8 scans to them or did you scan / telecine them yourself? Surely you didn't give them a cheap YouTube-compressed copy?

[rgr]

You have to use the Destripe filter in avisynth:

Before/after:
https://imgsli.com/MjM3MDE2

The image seems much less sharp. In another thread (which I started), the jagabo script seemed to give better results.

[rgr]

Hi,

attached are two versions of the same video clip. Titled Seq1 and Seq2. Both captured under different setups (players, cable connections) and with different codecs / compression.

Seq2 seems "nicer", but my opinion is this - this can only be said after post-processing. Then you can see what can be extracted from the image after removing the noise and the comparison makes more sense.

[Marvolo]

OK,
so here's another selection of nature shots. This time not beach and summer, but snow and winter. A lot of white and blue elements because of snow and sky. Again, my own capture with AmaRecTV and the 2008 DV one made with unknown equipment. Because of my capture chain I can't influence brightness and contrast levels manually but have to take it as it comes from the cam, just like with DV.

What can you see?

DV 2008 file in attachment, AmaRecTV file here due to size: https://we.tl/t-uGujYQCick

Thanks a lot

[Sharc]

Haven't we been discussing this blue mess before, in this and the other thread?

[rgr]

MiniDV looks a bit denoised (probably in a rather simple way). You can probably extract more from the amarec version, but the final results should be similar.
In such cases, good postprocessing has greater effects.

[Marvolo]

Haven't we been discussing this blue mess before, in this and the other thread?

Oh, did I upload that sequence before? I can't remember. Oh well then, nevermind.

Now that you're saying it, I think I DO remember something about "a blue mess". lol

But this time there shouldn't be any dropped frames in the AmaRecTV-capture, or so I hope.

[johnmeyer]

As you can see, I posted that on YouTube. Sony had hired a firm to search for and then license clips like mine. They showed my clips to the director who, I was told, fell in love with them.

And you sent the original Super8 scans to them or did you scan / telecine them yourself? Surely you didn't give them a cheap YouTube-compressed copy?

Goodness no. I sent them my original scans that, as I already said, I spent several days "perfecting."

My telecine is not as good as what you would get with a Rank Cintel or Spirit DataCine, the two scanners used by "Hollywood" post production houses. However (and I've told this story before in this forum), about four years ago I did another licensing deal for several reels of early 16mm 1930s B&W film taken by the Jewish owner of a movie camera factory who went around filming Nazi rallies in Dresden (before later escaping the country just after Kristallnacht). The Smithsonian Channel asked to license them, but wanted to re-scan the film. Fortunately, the owner still had the film (she eventually donated it to the Wiesenthal Museum) so we sent it to the Smithsonian's favorite post house. I arrange to have the results of that transfer sent to me before I forwarded them to the Smithsonian. I was finally able to compare my results with my HD Sony FX-1 capturing from a first-generation Moviestuff transfer system where I down-res in the camera to DV and capture that.

Bottom line: their transfer is better but, despite their better optics and better everything else, they were not able to resolve enough additional detail to be noticeable, and the compression artifacts, while slightly less were, once again, not too much different.

The one thing their transfer did better was capturing detail in the deep shadows.

[Sharc]

Haven't we been discussing this blue mess before, in this and the other thread?

Oh, did I upload that sequence before? I can't remember. Oh well then, nevermind.

Now that you're saying it, I think I DO remember something about "a blue mess". lol

But this time there shouldn't be any dropped frames in the AmaRecTV-capture, or so I hope.

Apart from the blue tint (oversaturated and clipped blue): Your Amarec capture has repeatedly a number of glitches on the top few lines of the picture (left) which the DV 2008 variant (right) does not have - or it was perhaps fixed.
If you are not willing to invest time in learning Avisynth or similar for post processing I would forget the analog route and stay with the DV 2008 variant.

[Marvolo]

Speaking of glitches... What are those purple bands on the right hand side or on top of the left capture?

[themaster1]

secam bands for sure

To get rid of them (right side):

avisource("myvideo.avi").assumetff()
ConvertToYUY2(interlaced=true)
U = UtoY() # separate U channel
V = VtoY() # separate V channel
V = Crop(V,0,0,-16,-0) #remove discoloured portion and black border
extra=Crop(V,342,0,2,-0).PointResize(12,V.height)
V=StackHorizontal(V,extra).AddBorders(0,0,4,0,$808080) # add the extra, pad to 720 with grey
YtoUV(U, V, last) # mix the separate U and V with the original Y

[Marvolo]

secam bands for sure

To get rid of them (right side):

avisource("myvideo.avi").assumetff()
ConvertToYUY2(interlaced=true)
U = UtoY() # separate U channel
V = VtoY() # separate V channel
V = Crop(V,0,0,-16,-0) #remove discoloured portion and black border
extra=Crop(V,342,0,2,-0).PointResize(12,V.height)
V=StackHorizontal(V,extra).AddBorders(0,0,4,0,$808080) # add the extra, pad to 720 with grey
YtoUV(U, V, last) # mix the separate U and V with the original Y

Thanks for the code. But my footage is PAL (Germany), not SECAM. Is it the same phenomenon then?

[Sharc]

Camera flaws. Not unusual. Search the forum, for example:
https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/388571-Remove-semi-transparant-Purple-green-line-a...analogue-video
https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/385637-Erase-red-purple-mark-%28VHS-capture%29
https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/354425-Hi8-capture-using-Digital8-camcorder-Edge-color-issues

Easiest is to just mask the crud on all sides. (Mask=crop and pad with clean black borders)