AnthonyR wrote:
I realize that you're using Premiere but what I'm going to give you is a
post from the Sony Vegas forum (credit to John Meyer) that he titled My
"ultimate" VHS tape restoration recipe. The underlying principles should be
applicable to almost any NLE. If you want to read the entire thread, go to
http://tinyurl.com/5qpoz HTH.
Mike
1. Use the best VCR you can find.
2. Make sure you turn on the Edit switch (sometimes called "tape dub"). This
defeats the "edge sharpening" circuit which makes some people think the
picture looks sharper, but actually loses detail. Also, use the S-Video
output.
3. Some people recommend using a Time Base Corrector between the VCR and
your capture device. My understanding of what a TBC does is that it
regenerates the sync signal which is extremely important if you are going to
record the signal on another analog tape. I am less certain, however, of its
importance if you immediately digitize the signal.
4. Capture your video. I use the pass-throuh on my camcorder. I find this
works far better than my ATI Radeon 8500 DV capture card.
Now comes the fun.
5. For truly amazing results, repeat step 4. That's right, capture the video
a second time. You then take this video and line it up on the Vegas timeline
directly above (or below) your original capture. Line the two up so they are
frame accurate. To do this alignment, set the opacity of the top video track
to exactly 50%, and then move the event on one track left or right one frame
at a time until you have perfect alignment. Use only the audio from one of
the two tracks. Check along the entire timeline to make sure that the video
hasn't gotten out of sync. If it has, split the video that isn't synced to
the audio and re-sync the two video tracks (you should have to do this more
than once or twice, even for a long capture).
You may find that your second capture is off by half a frame. This is due to
the fact that the capture card just sees fields coming in and then combines
them into frames. You therefore have a 50/50 chance of this happening. If it
does, use this AVISynth script to fix either of the two captures:
AviSource("e:\my video\VHS.avi")
SeparateFields
Trim(1,0)
Weave
Once you have fixed the capture, put it on the Vegas timeline and proceed as
described above.
[The following was added to the original post: Before rendering, set opacity
back to 100%, set each track level to 50%, and set composite mode for both
tracks to "Add." This will create an average of both tracks. If you need to
average three tracks, set each track level to 33%.]
Render the results of the merging of these two captures back to another
file.
6. You now have either a single capture, or if you are a qaulity freak and
have nothing better to do with your life, and followed the procedure in step
number 5, you now have an already vastly improved version of your tape.
However, regardless of whether you did step 5 or not, you can improve things
even further. Use the following three filters in VirtualDub, in this order,
to "scrub" the video:
Video DeNoise 1.2 (6.4.8)
Chroma Noise Reduction (1.1)
NRS (TS 6-10-100)
Use the defaults for the first two. For NRS, enable only the Temporal
Smoother, and set the Luminance Thresholds to 6 and 10. Leave everything
else unchecked and in their default positions.
This filtering is very subtle, but will get rid of most flicker, most chroma
fringing (including halos from bad edits on old non-flying erase head
machines), and introduce almost no visible artifacting. If you want to be
more aggressive, you can up the thresholds to 8 and 12, or even a little
higher. However, while you may at first like the results (because these
settings reduce the noise more), you will start to notice artifacts. Once
you notice them, you will hate them, and wish you hadn't set the thresholds
so high.
After VirtualDub has finished creating the cleaned video, bring this new
video into Vegas and edit, edit, edit.
BTW, none of these VirtualDub plugins can be loaded from within Vegas using
PluginPac because they are temporal in nature, and PluginPac doesn't handle
temporal plugins (ones that operate on more than one frame at a time).
Hope this helps someone! I've been working on this off and on for months,
and I just spent a complete day today testing all the various plugins and
searching every video forum I could find. The only things that might improve
on these results would be:
1. Do more than two captures. Some people have done as many as five (the
noise reduction improves in a logarithmic fashion, so you get progressively
less improvement with each subsequent capture). I have not explored this
because it seemed too time consuming.
2. Use AVISynth noise reduction filters. There are apparently many more
noise reduction filters available for AVISynth, but it is difficult to
interactively test these, so I stayed away from them. (Actually, I did test
them, and Peachsmoother and Dust are the two you might want to try).
3. Try the temporal cleaner in SpotRemover. Turn off the spot removing
function (designed to remove transitory dust specks from film) and just us
the cleaner. It is miraculous on some scenes, but introduces bad artifacts
on others. I wanted somthing that worked really well on pretty much any VHS
video.
