Cleaning Important Video

[egrimisu]

Hi,

Well i would like someone to help me clean a video that is very important for me. It's my father's 50 anniversarry and this is our familys only video, and my father haven't saw it since '97 after that our vcr broke and we didn't bought another. Now my father is almoust 64 and i wouls realy like to enjoy him a little showing him this tape cleaned a little.

So i went to this studio and they ripped the vhs tape to a pal dvd, the rip is horrible, the problem is that they don't have the experience or probably the equippment to rip it better. I'l post a 2minutes sample and if you have the time please try to help me. My knolege of avisynth is poor but i know a few basic stuff.
So this is the sample :) , you'll notice a 11 years old boy dancing with her sister in the video, well that's me :)

http://www.sendspace.com/file/lotha1

I don't care if the encoding will take weeks, i'll have the time and the rig to get it done (i7 920, 6gb ram).

Well i hope someone could help me for my only vhs treasure. Thanks

[Blue_MiSfit]

First off, you're probably best off getting a proper transfer done. Depending on where you live, there are encoding houses that can do a proper transfer with professional-grade equipment (pro S-VHS vcr with good time-base correction). It will cost some money, but as the rule goes - garbage in, slightly prettier garbage out :)

I'll take a look at your sample and see what can be done, though.

~MiSfit

[scharfis_brain]

get another transfer. your VHS was deinterlaced during the transfer.
so you already lost half the resolution and half the motion quality that is present on your VHS.

[egrimisu]

I'm living in a small town in Romania and there this is the best transfer i could get. :(

[Blue_MiSfit]

Indeed. Your source is deinterlaced (rather badly).

Here's my best shot at cleaning things up:

#The odd field seems better, so let's keep it and reinterpolate the rest with NNEDI
separatefields.selectodd.nnedi(1,true)

#Now some heavy duty MVDegrain2 to clean the luma up
super = MSuper(pel=2, sharp=1)
backward_vec2 = MAnalyse(super, isb = true, delta = 2, overlap=4)
backward_vec1 = MAnalyse(super, isb = true, delta = 1, overlap=4)
forward_vec1 = MAnalyse(super, isb = false, delta = 1, overlap=4)
forward_vec2 = MAnalyse(super, isb = false, delta = 2, overlap=4)
MDegrain2(super, backward_vec1,forward_vec1,backward_vec2,forward_vec2,thSAD=500)

#And finally my dear friend fft3dgpu to clean the blotchy, messy chroma!
fft3dgpu(plane=3, sigma=3, sigma2=3, sigma3=3, sigma4=3)

#Now let's sharpen things up a bit!
limitedsharpenfaster(SMode=4)

#As always, dithering helps after fft3dgpu
gradfunkmirror(1.51)

#And finally, add some grain to trick the eyes, and even things out.
grainfactory3(g1str=5, g2str=5, g3str=7)


HDRAGC also needs to be in there, but I'm having issues with it at the moment (all green frames output). If anyone knows the fix for this, I'd be a happy misfit :)

Wonderful video - I hope you can get it restored.

With a rig like that, couldn't you afford to have the VHS sent somewhere more professional, out of the country?

~MiSfit

[egrimisu]

well i could but for just one tape that king of investment? i don't realy see the point investing 500$ for just a tape. I would realy like to retransfer it if i just knew where... Testing the script now....

[egrimisu]

Indeed. Your source is deinterlaced (rather badly).

Here's my best shot at cleaning things up:

#The odd field seems better, so let's keep it and reinterpolate the rest with NNEDI
separatefields.selectodd.nnedi(1,true)

#Now some heavy duty MVDegrain2 to clean the luma up
super = MSuper(pel=2, sharp=1)
backward_vec2 = MAnalyse(super, isb = true, delta = 2, overlap=4)
backward_vec1 = MAnalyse(super, isb = true, delta = 1, overlap=4)
forward_vec1 = MAnalyse(super, isb = false, delta = 1, overlap=4)
forward_vec2 = MAnalyse(super, isb = false, delta = 2, overlap=4)
MDegrain2(super, backward_vec1,forward_vec1,backward_vec2,forward_vec2,thSAD=500)

#And finally my dear friend fft3dgpu to clean the blotchy, messy chroma!
fft3dgpu(plane=3, sigma=3, sigma2=3, sigma3=3, sigma4=3)

#Now let's sharpen things up a bit!
limitedsharpenfaster(SMode=4)

#As always, dithering helps after fft3dgpu
gradfunkmirror(1.51)

#And finally, add some grain to trick the eyes, and even things out.
grainfactory3(g1str=5, g2str=5, g3str=7)


HDRAGC also needs to be in there, but I'm having issues with it at the moment (all green frames output). If anyone knows the fix for this, I'd be a happy misfit :)

Wonderful video - I hope you can get it restored.

With a rig like that, couldn't you afford to have the VHS sent somewhere more professional, out of the country?

~MiSfit



can't find MSuper nowhere. Could you help?

[scharfis_brain]

i don't realy see the point investing 500$ for just a tape.
I don't care if the encoding will take weeks, i'll have the time and the rig to get it done (i7 920, 6gb ram).

Get yourself a TV-card or a VHS-DVD-Recorder (each should be 50 to 100 bucks) and do the transfer yourself. As you posted before you've got plenty of time to do so.

[egrimisu]

Thing's look better than the source but i was testing without GrainFactory3 since it's crashed when i put GrainFactory3.avsi in the plugins folder.

[egrimisu]

If the result from the actual source will be under my espectation i will opt for a VHS-DVD-Recorder.

Get yourself a TV-card or a VHS-DVD-Recorder (each should be 50 to 100 bucks) and do the transfer yourself. As you posted before you've got plenty of time to do so.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Nah, VHS->DVD will be very lossy if you're going for serious quality.

VHS->Capture Card->Lossless YUY2->AviSynth->DVD will be a lot better.

As to your plugins, you're probably looking at some DLL problems in your AviSynth plugins folder.

I'd clean out your plugins folder to a bare minimum. Also, HDRAGC will help a lot! I can't seem to get it working though :p

~MiSfit

[2Bdecided]

For one tape, don't buy anything - it would be a waste of time and money, and you might wear the tape out trying over and over to do things right.

If you can wait "weeks" for cleaning and encoding, then you can also wait a week to post it somewhere, and get a nice DVD back.

There are even places that will send you DV-AVI files or even lossless on a HDD, if you want to go that far.

You could try asking in the relevant www.videohelp.com forum.

Cheers,
David.

[2Bdecided]

I've downloaded and looked at it now.

It's not that bad at all.

The deinterlacing is unnecessary, and not very good. I think it's changed the frame size too - camcorder video wouldn't normally fill 720x576 so well.

The levels are typical consumer camcorder video i.e. by design there's too much luma and chroma, and hence it won't display on a PC properly - but it'll look very bright and colourful on a standard TV if you don't clip it during processing. There's currently no clipping of the digital luma values - the clipping that was present on the original tape (due to the original camcorder) is faithfully preserved, well within range. I think the same is true of the chroma.

It's not that wobbly. It's either a fairly good tape transferred without a TBC, or a poor tape transferred with a TBC.

A random guess would be that the TBC also deinterlaced it.

The MPEG-2 encoding for DVD isn't bad at all. The source has some noise, but it doesn't break up into blocks.

I've seen far far worse!


No one you show it to is going to care at all about the deinterlacing, the video noise, the levels, the white balance, the softness, or anything else. They'll all be too busy looking at how much they and their family have changed over the past 1.5 decades.

Cheers,
David.