The power of Avisynth: restoring old 8mm films.

[fpp]

Originally Posted by videoFred

I suggest to start a new thread because this one becomes pretty heavy. Then I will place a link in the first post of this thread. You can do the same in your thread. This way, people with 8mm transfers on VHS will not have to search this entire thread. And people with frame-to frame transfers will find their way to my thread.
Fred.

As promised, the new topic is online :
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=161493

I tried to cram a lot of stuff inside, and may have gone a bit overboard.

Comments & suggestions welcome :-)

[fpp]

Originally Posted by aymeric106

Hello !

Those scripts are really amazing !

What can I expect from a capture I made with a DV camera (shutter speed 1/50 s, the movie being played around 16,6 fps) ?

What should be added to the script ? (deinterlace, duplicate frame remover or something )

Aymeric,

Maybe this is a little bit late, but probably some of the notions explained in my new topic (see previous post) could be adapted to your case...

[fpp]

I finally gathered back some common sense and succeeded in making a side-by-side, before/after comparison, as suggested earlier by John:

[clive18]

Hi.
I have been making nice progress with the script, thanks very much for this magical software.

My difficulty has come from the fact that some of my captures were done in 16:9 (wide screen) and some in "regular" 4:3 aspect ratio. After the script has run , I cannot get the wide screen captures to play in a wide format, so everyone looks thinner than they should be

The settings I am wondering about are on this line:
"W=720 H=576 #final size from the returned clip"

I was thinking maybe I need to change these setting for wide screen, but I am not sure.

Also what would one change these settings to if one were to capture in HD? 1920 X 1080 ? (planning for the future..

Any comments are welcome, and I appologise if this is a video newbie question.

regards
Clive

[videoFred]

Originally Posted by clive18

The settings I am wondering about are on this line:
"W=720 H=576 #final size from the returned clip"

I was thinking maybe I need to change these setting for wide screen, but I am not sure.

Why do you not try it?

Fred.

[Pieter8mm]

Originally Posted by clive18
My difficulty has come from the fact that some of my captures were done in 16:9 (wide screen) and some in "regular" 4:3 aspect ratio. After the script has run , I cannot get the wide screen captures to play in a wide format, so everyone looks thinner than they should be

I got very nice footage to 16x9 with this script from Robert Martens. See his tutorial on;
http://www.gyroshot.com/simpleslug.htm

[2Bdecided]

Originally Posted by clive18

The settings I am wondering about are on this line:
"W=720 H=576 #final size from the returned clip"

For "PAL" DVD, all content is 720x576 (704x576, or, rarely, some lower resolution version). Whether it's displayed as 16x9 or 4x3 depends on a flag in the encoding, not the number of pixels - you must set the flag in your MPEG encoder (or hack it after encoding) - AVIsynth cannot set the flag in the AVI file because there is none to set.

For web use, it's usual to render square pixels - e.g. 768x576 for 4x3, 1024x576 for 16x9. The "NTSC" frame sizes are more usual on the web - e.g. 640x480 for 4x3 and 640x360 or something like 856x480 for 16x9. It's quite common to upscale to 1280x720 for YouTube to make it deliver higher quality, even if the original isn't HD.

Cheers,
David.

[mathmax]

I always have a problem with this script. Some frames are badly processed... colors are suddenly very dark. Please look:




What is that problem?

[johnmeyer]

Make sure you crop the black borders before you feed the video to the script.

[mathmax]

indeed, I added the black borders before I applied the script. Does that cause the problem?

[johnmeyer]

Originally Posted by mathmax

indeed, I added the black borders before I applied the script. Does that cause the problem?

VideoFred may have to reply to this. It has been over a year since I posted all my suggestions and updates to his script, and I am now forgetting some of the things I found back then.

You will find that he temporarily adds a border before doing the Autolevels in order to "soften" (his words) the effect. I seem to remember that I played around with that quite a bit and ended up with something similar to what you posted, namely that a frame would suddenly go very dark, and then, a few frames later, the levels would "pop" back up to normal again.

I was initially using the script on 8mm film which is almost exactly square. Because of this, you end up with pillar borders when you capture and edit using a 4:3 aspect ratio. These pillars resulted in very bad things happening with the Depan motion stabilization, so I modified his script to permit you to remove them before submitting the video to the script, and then adding them back in as the last step. That solved the Depan problems, and seemed to make everything else in the script "happier."

If you look at my version of the script, posted in one of my first responses in this thread, and you'll see how I did that.

[mathmax]

Originally Posted by johnmeyer

VideoFred may have to reply to this. It has been over a year since I posted all my suggestions and updates to his script, and I am now forgetting some of the things I found back then.

You will find that he temporarily adds a border before doing the Autolevels in order to "soften" (his words) the effect. I seem to remember that I played around with that quite a bit and ended up with something similar to what you posted, namely that a frame would suddenly go very dark, and then, a few frames later, the levels would "pop" back up to normal again.

I was initially using the script on 8mm film which is almost exactly square. Because of this, you end up with pillar borders when you capture and edit using a 4:3 aspect ratio. These pillars resulted in very bad things happening with the Depan motion stabilization, so I modified his script to permit you to remove them before submitting the video to the script, and then adding them back in as the last step. That solved the Depan problems, and seemed to make everything else in the script "happier."

If you look at my version of the script, posted in one of my first responses in this thread, and you'll see how I did that.

In fact, I have the same problem with MDegrain2() or MVDegrainMulti() isolated in a script.. the error seem to come from these functions...

[videoFred]

Originally Posted by johnmeyer

You will find that he temporarily adds a border before doing the Autolevels in order to "soften" (his words) the effect.

Yes, I did this because the original Autolevels was far from perfect. Frustum has tracked a colorspace bug in this filter and he has fixed this. His modified version of Autolevels is working pretty good now. He has added lots of new parameters also. The autolevels effect can now be limited with output_high and output_low. So there is no reason anymore now to add borders before processing.

I have my new scripts ready, the are all using the modified autolevels filter. I have also improved the stabilizing and the sharpening. And I have made a new helpfile.

Upload is coming soon

Fred.

[mathmax]

Originally Posted by videoFred

Yes, I did this because the original Autolevels was far from perfect. Frustum has tracked a colorspace bug in this filter and he has fixed this. His modified version of Autolevels is working pretty good now. He has added lots of new parameters also. The autolevels effect can now be limited with output_high and output_low. So there is no reason anymore now to add borders before processing.

I have my new scripts ready, the are all using the modified autolevels filter. I have also improved the stabilizing and the sharpening. And I have made a new helpfile.

Upload is coming soon

Fred.

videoFred, your script is very nice.. but unfortunatly I always have the error I mentioned before on some frames when I use it.. Any idea of the problem?

[videoFred]

Originally Posted by mathmax

videoFred, your script is very nice.. but unfortunatly I always have the error I mentioned before on some frames when I use it.. Any idea of the problem?

No, I have no idea. Never have seen this kind of error before. You are using my script on video, right? It's not made for this... There are other solutions for video.

Fred.

[mathmax]

Originally Posted by videoFred

No, I have no idea. Never have seen this kind of error before. You are using my script on video, right? It's not made for this... There are other solutions for video.

Fred.

well.. no matter the source. I always get this error when I perform the script. I'm pretty sure it comes from MVAnalyseMulti() cause I got the same kind of error on scripts containing that function
Maybe it's a problem with the DLL.. is that function part of mvtools 2?

[videoFred]

Originally Posted by mathmax

Maybe it's a problem with the DLL.. is that function part of mvtools 2?

No, MVTools2 is from Fizick and it's used in the script for the interpolation only.

MVAnalyseMulti() is part of -guess what- MVToolsMulti. MVToolsMulti is a modified version of the original MVTools. The dll is named MVTools.dll. Perhaps it would be better to rename it to MVToolsMulti.dll.


But there are several MVToolsMulti dll files, optimised for different computer systems. I just took the one that was working on all my computers. XP and Vista, I have not checked the script on Win7 yet.

Anyhow, you will find all these versions in the 'Source' directory of the package. Perhaps another dll will solve your problem. Be careful because they all have the same name: MVTools.dll.

Fred.

[mathmax]

Originally Posted by videoFred

No, MVTools2 is from Fizick and it's used in the script for the interpolation only.

MVAnalyseMulti() is part of -guess what- MVToolsMulti. MVToolsMulti is a modified version of the original MVTools. The dll is named MVTools.dll. Perhaps it would be better to rename it to MVToolsMulti.dll.


But there are several MVToolsMulti dll files, optimised for different computer systems. I just took the one that was working on all my computers. XP and Vista, I have not checked the script on Win7 yet.

Anyhow, you will find all these versions in the 'Source' directory of the package. Perhaps another dll will solve your problem. Be careful because they all have the same name: MVTools.dll.

Fred.

Indeed I didn't have this problem when working in XP. I'm on win 7 now. My processor is a core i5 but I removed the call to SetMTMode() to process the script on a single thread.. maybe that causes a problem.

The dll are all from 2008.. aren't there new version? Which one do you think I should use?

[videoFred]

Originally Posted by mathmax

The dll are all from 2008.. aren't there new version? Which one do you think I should use?

I do not know. Try them all

MVToolsMulti() is from Josey_Wells and you will find it in the MVTools thread around page 50. As far as I know there are no newer versions.

Fred.

[clive18]

Thanks Pieter8mm and 2Bdecided for your feedback regarding my widescreen capture. Its a bit strange that wide screen SD is the same resolution as 4:3 in SD. The pixels are actually rectangular, giving it the extra width.

I have decided to recapture in normal 4:3 aspect ratio as I now realise that by capturing in widescreen I have effectively reduced the number of vertical pixel resolution by 30%.

Thanks again
regards
Clive