O/T video restoration & enhancing tools

[John Stewart Miller]

Just wanted to exchange advice, in an age where many amateurs are trying to polish collectible t.v. items up for DVD transfer to the highest quality without the budget of the t.v. companies.
I've 3 VHS machines currently. Of these the SHARP VC MH705 seems to have the best drop out compensator I've come across. Where a frame block (i.e. by dust) has led to static interference (causing a frame jump), it seems to fill in some information from either side frames where otherwise there would be a blank. The problem here is the machine has a very erratic tracking alignment sensitivity level. You can set it and unknowingly go slightly off resulting in a dot crawl line which usually occurs only 30 seconds later and may only be noticed on replay. (meaning running back, resetting & starting again). The Sharp has a clearer definition than the Philips 6 head machine I have, but sometimes the Philips can look better as the enhancement of a VHS sharp electronic edges look can degrade the picture, looking 'solarized'.

I now have also the JVC S - VHS ET (HR - S597). This has several setting options. You can sharpen or soften. Softening, in the case of a 'ready steady go' which was film of tape on VHS quality where figure outlines had a double edged look, can improve this. It seems to be like computer j-peg sharpening packages. The machine contains a 'vid stabiliser'. Described to correct vertical jitter or wobbles, it actually seems to be a high grade time base corrector. I had a tape with unstable, white picture banding, which wobbled up & down. It held it, not perfectly, but so the image was acceptible, and also corrects frame jumps.
Despite, the S - VHS can't drop out compensate for 'dust drop outs' as well as the Sharp. I wonder if anyone knows of the kind of application I should look for to cover this area, without breaking my pocket. Are there any more down market versions of things like the 'reviz retimer' or 'Albatross' packages I've heard of in proffessional use. Or, can anyone offer a pointer to the kind of tool I might need to patch over missing tape frames, maybe if costly, at a future date?

I also have noticed DVD transferral of tape seems to apply a quantity of time base correction anyway?

[BizMark]

Well, DVD recorders, by their very nature, include a frame buffer, which is exactly what a time-base corrector is.

So yes, feeding any input into a DVD recorder by definition timebase corrects it.

I would agree that the sharpest output is not best for DVD transfer; I have a Sony SLV-E700, the output of which is very sharp but can be grainy and have slightly wavy colour if the tape has worn. I also have a Panasonic JV-710, on which the picture is softer but generally more stable picture and with less colour drift. From what I can tell, the Panasonic (and I'm sure any recent model of theirs will be the same) employs some kind of double-sampling of the control track, as sometimes when it offlocks, you see two copies of the image, offset by a few pixels, before they combine and then soften. So it is probably averaging all the picture information and, indeed, the synchronisation pulses - which in itself 'improves' (but doesn't correct) the timebase.

The Panasonic gives much better results than the Sony for DVD purposes, as the Sony seems to give slightly too much detail for the MPEG compression to deal with comfortably.

[John Stewart Miller]

Thanks for this - Quick point I wanted to cover was as to the nature of the differences between HQ (sometimes referred to as M1 mode) and standard (or M2) DVD settings. In tape terms it seems to be similar to S.P. in comparison to L.P. What actually happens when material is transferred in HQ, and would it be true to say that its better applied to an item according to its individual quality rather than as an overall (i.e. every recording) standard ?

[Blacknun]

Guest-John said:

Thanks for this - Quick point I wanted to cover was as to the nature of the differences between HQ (sometimes referred to as M1 mode) and standard (or M2) DVD settings. In tape terms it seems to be similar to S.P. in comparison to L.P. What actually happens when material is transferred in HQ, and would it be true to say that its better applied to an item according to its individual quality rather than as an overall (i.e. every recording) standard ?

The bitrate is twice as high on HQ. This means twice as much information is written for each frame, so blocking and blurring are kept to a minimum.

[tr]

use a stand alone ctb100 TBC and a mpeg 2 encoder card for your pc, problem solved.

the ctb100 cleans the appearence of the video and created timebase
with the mpeg2 card you can choose be best rate to compress, not just stuck with 2 standard dvd recorder settings
and of course you can edit the ads out on the pc