Recommended Spatial / Temporal Filter?

[blade29]

Hello everyone. Excuse me for being a newbie with AVISynth, CCE, and filters and asking this general question, but I was wondering which spatial/temporal filter you would recommend to remove noise from an analog capture (VHS football game)? I've gone through the forums and seen posts on mipsmooth, fluxsmooth, dust, convolution3d, and stmedian, but which filter would you recommend for quality and time (along with your settings). I've tried convolution3d, but it is very slow (10 hours for converting and filtering the first half of the football game to DVD format from AVI - 90 minutes of footage (20 GB)using CCE 2.67).

Any suggestions and comments are welcome. Please let me know. Thanks.

blade29

[neily]

blade29,

Don't disregard the inbuilt TemporalSoften and SpatialSoften just because they are inbuilt. In combination, they really are pretty powerful, and I would certainly suggest using them as a starting point.

[DoW]

As to the fact that it took 10 hours, yes, it will be slow. There are a lot of calculations going on to smooth and remove noise. BTW, without knowing your processor, we really can't gauge if this is particularly fast or slow.

[blade29]

DoW, I have an Athlon 1.4 Gz processor, 512 DDR memory, two 40 GB 7200 RPM hard drives, and I'm using Windows XP Pro. I'm looking to see what I can do to reduce some time. How long does it take you to filter and convert your video?

blade29

[DoW]

How long you ask? LONG. Im getting about 3 fps output on my Athlon 2100+, 1GB DDR266 (really need to OC this beast), dual WD SE 120GB, and XP Pro.

This being with a script like:
mpegsource(*.d2v)
Telecide()
Decimate()
converttoYUY2()
Convolution3d(preset="animeHQ")
PixieDust(6)
ConverttoYV12()
Crop(4,0,716,480) #as I recall
LanzcosResize(640,480)
Warpsharp(30) #needs it do to the softness of the source and convo3d

[Mug Funky]

hmm. i'm currently VCD-ing a show about what the world thinks of america now. very similar circumstances. i captured it with a camcorder. the tape was long play (bad) and the s-video cable was too long (really really bad dot crawl). even so, i'm getting faster times on a computer half the speed, so i'll help you out with my script.

WARNING! this script deliberately blurs crapola out of my footage to kill the colour crosstalk (GuavaComb couldn't help, and slowed it down).

script:

vid=AVISource("g:\america1.avi","g:\america2.avi","g:\america3.avi").fixbrokenchromaupsampling()
aud=wavsource("g:\america.wav")

audiodub(vid,aud)

#guavacomb(mode="PAL",recall=85,maxvariation=100,activation=0)

separatefields()
selecteven()
crop(0,37,720,215)
converttorgb()
generalconvolution(0,"0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0")
convertbacktoyuy2()

bicubicresize(352,288,.333,.333).levels(4,1,219,0,255)

peachsmoother(noisereduction=55,stability=25)

temporalsoften(4,0,5)
DelayAudio(0.04)


hope this helps a little. my computer is a PIII 733, 120gb HDD (new. i love it to bits) and i'm feeding it straight into TMPGenc.

theoretically it will be faster for you because you're not resizing it like i am.

[Mug Funky]

oh! some stuff i forgot to mention. my footage is 90mins also, and the time it will take (it's still going now...) is 6:15. that's quite a lot faster than 10 hours.

one thing i might suggest is keeping your footage in yuy2 (or yv12, but i don't have avisynth 2.5 yet 'cause i'm lazy) for all the big operations.

also, your DV codec is very important. i was using the Pinnacle codec, and although it is better quality (it doesn't clamp at CCIR levels, cutting off your super-white), it is very slow, and decodes in RGB24 which is awful. to make my encoding faster (about 90%) i installed the mainconcept codec to do my decoding. i have the installers for pinnacle and mainconcept lying around handy so i can switch them over in a few seconds...

so yeah. check your DV codec, and keep your processing in yuy2 as much as possible and it should speed up significantly.

[Zarxrax]

For anime material, I find that Deen and Temporal Cleaner give excellant results.

[DoW]

What I posted was a very simplified version of my script (Didnt have it at work). I have a good deal of tweaks to the script. I havent yet had a chance to mess with deen or edeen yet, do to the massive override file Im creating for the IVTC.

[blade29]

Great. Thanks for all of your suggestions. A question for everyone, what application or process do you use to test your script results? I've tried bringing the AVS script into Windows Media Player (kind of just stutters the video along) and I've used AVSGenie, which is nice. With AVSGenie, you can see your source and target video (top to bottom) on the same screen and see your filtered results. You can change your filter settings and save your AVS script. I still need to get a little more familiar with it though. I'm just trying to figure out how to bring in additional filters into the application.

blade29

[neily]

blade29,

For all the downloads, no-one has ever actually asked for support for a particular plugin for AVSGenie. It is a bit time-consuming adding "native" support for plugins and keeping them up to date, and as you can see, many people have there own preferences. I have tried to include ones which are universally highly regarded. I certainly don't think I will add any more v2.0x only plugins, as I now believe 2.5x is the way to go.

I don't know what version of AVSGenie you are using. v0.2.5.11 is the latest. Plugins not "natively supported" can be accessed in a number of ways. If plugins are autoloaded, just a single line text can be inserted. Alternatively if you want to manually load plugins, there is now a user-definable AlwaysLoad text area, that will always be loaded at the start of a script, with a sinlge UserLine being used for the function. Alternatively, the plugin can be loaded and included using UserText. The latest version also has a plugin half way house, where any plugin can be set up with parameters appearing in a grid. I think it works quite well, and may expand the number from 3 to 5 or so. At present each plugin setup is saved to a single file. But I am also fiddling with the idea of a plugin manager, where I can basically provide a single text file containing the pertinent details of as many plugins as I wish. The user will then be able to select / edit, and easily transfer these setups to the UserPlugin pages.

Sometimes, plugin writers don't make life as easy as they could for users. From my perspective, the most user-friendly plugins have parameters that are all optional, with sensible defaults, and help files that clearly outline each parameter, default values, and value ranges.

[unplugged]

IMHO, eDeen by MarcFD is the most effective spatial smoother for hard jobs like TV/VHS capture and other noisy sources.
It is also the fastest spatial filter that I have ever tried, especially with high radius 5-7 it is really fast if you compare it with the rest of spatial filters (radius based).
And I must add that radius based spatial smoothers start to do a "clean job" only when you give high radius (important >3 for smarter noise approach).

Try it ;)

On the temporal side, for noisy sources PeachSmoother really does the job, I disable the spatial flag and use it jointly with eDeen!! :D
(TemporalSoften has given me good results too, but only with LOW noise stuff)
And I "remember" you that PeachSmoother is fast too ;) (DScaler realtime adaptive denoiser)

just one example:
eDeen(5,6,18,1,3,false)
PeachSmoother(NoiseReduction=50,Stability=0,DoSpatial=false)
P.S.: ok, SpatialSoften is VERY good and natural, but it's one hell slooow.

[blade29]

Once again, thanks to everyone for their suggestions. I have a number of clips I want to try the mentioned filters on. This should keep me busy.

blade29

[DoW]

I hate to say it, but the only real way you can test the effectivness of filters is to pick a source thats noisy and nasty, encode a small section (cause encoding a big section would take forever), and look at it. Your eyes are the best tool availible to you. PSNR values and such, while useful, are not your eyes, and dont always reflect how visually pleasing the video is to you.
PS. BTW, I use temporalsoften and such on fade portions of video because dust messes up on those.