Premiere & VirtualDub Filters: Lossless

[Fredrik_A]

I've started digitalize and edit a big library of old VHS movies from the 80-90's to DVDs in Premiere Pro 1.5. Many of them have a huge amount of nosie and I've tried a couple of denoisers and grain removals in Premiere without satisfaction. Today I tried VirtualDub and was very satisfied with the internal Temporal Smoother (4) and like to use it for some of my material. But now the problems starts...

I thought about making a frameserver in VirtualDub and then open the file in Premiere. However, I got the warning message: "One or more filters in the filter chain has a non-zero lag. This will cause the served video to lag behind the audio!" So, I guess that solution is out of the question.

Then I thought about applying the Temporal Smoother and render a new "source file" but I'm not sure if that will bring losses in quality because of the conversion between different formats. My source material is in DV (Premiere's version) and I guess VirtualDub uses another internal DV-codec.

Any ideas how I can use VirtualDub filters in Premiere without quality losses? I know a little about AviSynth but I want to avoid it as much as possible as I like to work in GUI's. Next time I guess it's a better way to capture in some lossless codec from the beginning and start from there.

I wish there was a mouse-click solution to all our noise-problems :)

Fredrik

[ShawnFumo]

Here's a question for you, which I'm not sure the answer of. Premiere says the video will lag, but is that only in the preview or also during the final render? If it is only during the preview, you could edit using the original source files and then replace them with the frameserved files for the final render. Premiere has facilities for swapping out clips since a lot of people edit at low-res and then do the final with high-res clips. But if it lags even in the render, then I guess you're stuck.

Depending on your hard drive space, you could save out to Huffyuv in virtualdub, which is lossless. As for what kind of DV it saves to, it is whatever DV codec is installed on the system in VfW (Virtualdub doesn't use directshow filters).

Actually, you may want to check out Wax. It says it can be used as a plugin in premiere, and it can use virtualdub filters. It is even freeware.. :)

http://www.debugmode.com/wax/

Hope that helps,
Shawn