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View Full Version : New person: I captured an old VHS tape and would like to reduce the jitter


garrickk
15th March 2004, 19:24
I'm in the process of putting some old VHS tapes onto DVD's. Yeah, this is asked 1,000 times before and I've read every post I could before posting, but I just have a question about removing some of the motion or constant "shaking" of the video.

The video quality is very, very poor, and I really don't think too much could be done to help it. However, before I compress the video (I use Sonic Foundry DVD Architect - easy and fool proof with fairly good results), I would like to remove the constant bobbing or jittering (I don't know technically what it is) that is present in the video. I figure if I could remove some of the whole-frame bouncing and movement it would compress a little better and might look a little cleaner.

For the source, I captued with VirtualDub (with the Bt878a drivers always suggested here) per the capture guide posted here at 640x480, 29.9696 fps, 4:2:2 YUY2, Huffy codec. The capture looks as good as the source off the tape, to my eyes, and the audio is perfectly in sync (16 bit PCM, mono, 48kHz).

Other than setting up triming and fading with AVISynth and other tiny touches, I'm increasing the gamma with the "Levels" filter because the videos are dark. This is the only filter I've been experimenting with happily and it does help this source.

Levels(0, 1.3, 255,0, 255)

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I'm guessing a simple "smoother" filter in VirtualDub would help a bit. I also tried that flaxenVHS filter but with little success and I don't understand the settings (also couldn't find any examples, help, discussiong of it's use)

PC: 2.8GHz P4, Leadtek Winfast 2000 XP but with generic Bt878a drivers for VirtualDub, plenty of memory and HDD space

I'm working on my video/audio encoding/decoding knowledge...

Belgabor
17th March 2004, 09:17
Have you tried Deshaker (http://biphome.spray.se/gunnart/video/)?

scharfis_brain
17th March 2004, 09:23
oh-oh
deshaker does not do a good job with jittery videos.
Its not íntended for this purpose.

I suggest to do multiple capturing.

This means capping the Tape 4 or even 8 times into the computer and then averaging all clips.

THis will significatly increase stability (remove jitter) and reduce noise.

But it is very, very hard to process, because of dropped frames, that cause async between the video.

rfmmars
18th March 2004, 07:00
I think you said that it look ok on capture, but is bouncing on playback, is this correct?

richard