Trying to increase speed

[steptoe]

Can anybody come up with suggestions for this script I'm trying out to get better quality from poor VHS sources

They are the Lemon Popsicle series of films, which are pretty poor quality with plenty of scratches and just old age for the source tapes and also lines running across the very bottom of the screen due to the tape just been worn out. So I'm trying to transfer them before I lose them for good and have to track them down again

It has improved them drastically, with very few noticable scratches left and even the odd tape crease that causes the mass of lines across the output is reduced drastically

The snag is the speed, it took 20 minutes to do a test run of about 1 min 30 secs while I got the filters to work and see what effect they had

But if this will get the best from the source then it will be time well spent

I use DVD-RB and CCE SP 2.70.02.06, running on an Athlon 64 3000 running stable overclocked to 2007 and 1.5GB of memory

My average CCE times seem to be around 1.1 when doing standard backups with my "standard" DVD backup script :

SetMemoryMax(250)
LoadPlugin("E:\Video Related\AviSynth\plugins\Colormatrix.dll")
ColorMatrix(mode="Rec.601->Rec.709",hints=true)

But using the filters I've been playing with the VHS sources it drops rapidly, and CCE averages around 0.8 to 0.14 with this script :

SetMemoryMax(250)
LoadPlugin("E:\Video Related\AviSynth\plugins\Colormatrix.dll")
Import("E:\Video Related\AviSynth\plugins\RemoveDirt.avs")
Import("E:\Video Related\AviSynth\plugins\MVBob.avs")
ColorMatrix(mode="Rec.601->Rec.709",hints=true)
Lanczos4Resize(720,576,0,0,0,546)
MVBob()
CNR2()
DeGrainMedian(limitY=5,limitUV=7,mode=1,norow=true)
DeGrainMedian(limitY=5,limitUV=7,mode=1,norow=true)
RemoveGrain(mode=17)
RemoveDirt()
HDRAGC()

Suggestions what filters I don't need, or faster alternatives would be helpful and get me to learn more about filters, which I'm slowly understanding but some of the filters are confusing due to the sheer number of options that can be altered to get the best from each source

[check]

Some images of the raw source would be very useful.

[Mug Funky]

firstly, degrainmedian and removedirt perform similar functions (though they are quite different). chaining 2 degrainmedians and then running removedirt is going to mush the temporal details something shocking - pans and subtle movement will turn to video soup.

one alternative that works fairly well is to run removedirt, then follow with fft3dfilter(bw=16,bh=16,ow=8,oh=8,bt=0,sigma=1.2)

sigma can be raised or lowered depending on the source, but 1.2 is fairly strong with the settings i've chosen (i use this one a fair bit).

having removedirt first will help fft3d catch noise as well, and remove some spots etc.

also, mvbob is extremely slow and not likely to give you much more detail on VHS than a less sophisticated (and much faster) deinterlacer will give.

or you could even separate odd and even fields, run your filter chain on each and merge back - output will remain interlaced and speed will increase a lot. you'll have to change your resizing line though.

[steptoe]

After reading through degrainmedian docs, I thought I was running too many filters as it does uses similiar functions to removegrain

Also considered separating my source into odd and even a few times to see what a difference it would make

I'll have a go at removing filters that are basically doing the same thing, and also try adding FFT3D, tried that one before but couldn't work out yet again why it was failing, but I'm getting the hang of the reasons why filters and functions don't run

I'll try removing mvbob, and seeing if a deinterlacer does anything, it may not even need it, as I wasn't that sure what MVBob did, but did make a big difference to the final output, and yes it is very slow

My averages were also wrong, CCE runs at an average of 0.08 to 0.14 ..... so that needs speeding up somewhere