filtering VHS line shimmer

[EricBall]

I'm hoping that someone has some suggestions on how to deal with this, although I wasn't able to find any posts describing a similar situation.

Like many others, I have some (prerecorded) VHS tapes which I would like to transfer to DVD. I captured the video using a JVC SVHS VCR connected via S-Video to a Pinnacle PCTVpro using the btwincap drivers, VirtualVCR and Huffyuv. So far I've only done some vertical cropping and IVTC using Decomb.

My next challenge is to remove the line shimmer (which also existed with the interlaced frames) before sending it on to TMPGEnc. Each line seems to be at a slightly different brightness from the ones around it and it changes frame to frame too. I'm thinking some temporal & vertical spatial filtering should take care of most of it.

Any suggestions?

JPEG attachments below as requested.

[Wilbert]

Please convert your screenshots to jpeg first (unless you can't see the artefacts in that case).

[Wilbert]

Did you try jpeg and compared it? If the line shimmer indeed disappeared you may upload the pngs again.

[EricBall]

Frame 1

[EricBall]

Frame 2

[Spotteri]

In my case Deen-filter cleared the shimmer and some grain pritty well

Heres the script I used:

avisource("c:\cap.video.avi")
KernelBob(1).SelectEven().BilinearResize(352,288)
deen("c3d",1,10,12,10,12,0,9)
Tweak(bright=0, cont=1, sat=1.8, hue=10, coring=false)
warpsharp(50,1,60,-0.6)

On the script, the Deen setting is little heavy. You might want to try something little lighter. The material I prosessed was really crappy.

[EricBall]

It turns out TemporalSoften(2,4,0,16,2) did a surprisingly good job getting rid of the line shimmer I was seeing. A little SpatialSoften(1,4,3) helped out with the noise as well.

One weird thing - I see a lot more noise in very dark, near black, portions (like shadows & space) on my TV than I do on my PC. I'm not sure whether I just need to increase the thresholds a little bit so if something else is required. There also seems to be a minor chroma component to the noise.

[FredThompson]

You might want to play with DarkSmoother http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=56517

Peach might also help

The "downside" to filtering the near black is you can have large areas with the same value which will also look annoying, just in a different way. Think of the "flat" areas you'll see in near-blacks in low-bandwidth digital streams.

[Arachnotron]

One weird thing - I see a lot more noise in very dark, near black, portions (like shadows & space) on my TV than I do on my PC.Before you try to remedy that, be sure to set the blacklevel of your TV set using a tuning DVD like Avia or video essentials. Many TV's are much to bright by default.