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Cleaning up picture on imported VHS footage??
How do I clean up this Vhs footage(especially the horizontal lines) is there a plugin in Vegas that are able to do that? Or what to do???
Here are 2 screenshots:
Allan Boes!!!
Working in Vegas pro 10 and Adobe CS5 -
13 Replies
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none that I am aware of, this is tape noise. However, here’s something you can try – capture the tape again. It’s possible that some of the noise does not occur in the same place, so by aligning and averaging the two tracks you may reduce it some.
Boris Continuum 7 (a Vegas Plug-in) has a Noise Reducer that you may want to investigate.
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
Stephen has the best answer I’ve come up with. If the noise is actually random, multiple sampling is a time-honored signal-processing technique. You basically scale each sample by 1/N, then sum the N samples. The result is the signal at normal levels, but the noise at 1/N. Now, if the noise isn’t random, but due to fixed defects in the tape, this won’t help.
You might see some advantage to trying it on different decks. I found this to be very true, restoring an old 8mm video I had shot back in the 90s. The original camera wasn’t much good, but another I tried did much better. That old analog thing at work.
Now, back to the hurricane….
-Dave
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I used VirtualDub and various filters to achieve the below:
SAMPLE 1
Unfiltered from VHS tape:
Filtered in VirtualDub:
SAMPLE 2
Unfiltered from VHS tape:
Filtered in VirtualDub:
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Hey Robert
What filters did you use?
Allan Boes!!!
Working in Vegas pro 10 and Adobe CS5 -
Hey Robert
What filters did you use?
Allan Boes!!!
Working in Vegas pro 10 and Adobe CS5 -
Deshaker was used, so two passes were needed.
PASS 1
The Filters
Shift Filter: Set to match the shift needed in Pass 2. (For interlaced video ‘X’ must be an even number else the field order gets messed up.)
Deshaker Filter – Pass 1
PASS 2
The filters:
VHS Filter: Used to bring colors into alignment.
Chroma Noise Reduction: Removed typical VHS color noise.
Shift Filter: Centers image within screen area.
Hue/Saturation/Intensity Filter: Some manual color balance adjustments.
Brightness/Contrast Filter: Manual contrast adjustment.
Neat Video Filter. The version I used couldn’t handle interlaced video so the ViewFields/UnViewFields filters were used to get around the problem. Later versions can handle interlaced video. Extensive testing found that Neat Video produced better results than any other noise filter or combination of filters. Note that I didn’t remove all the noise to retain as much detail as possible, and I also did some sharpening in Neat Video.
Deshaker Filter – Pass 2: The Extra Zoom Factor setting removes the black boarder from the video capture as well as hides borders resulting from deshaking.
ACOBW Filter: Auto white balance adjustment.
That’s it.
The video source was very poor having been recorded in February 1993, and been copied from the source VHSC tape to VHS. Overall, I’m happy with the results, which do look better when the video is playing vs. a still image.
I didn’t used any compression for the audio. Compression for the video was DV for standard definition video, and x264 for deshaked HD video.
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The ‘Chroma Noise Reduction’ filter (see my above post) may well remove much of the noise from video in the original post of this thread.
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I read with intense interest the remark on cleaning up video noise by employing multiple sampling utilizing 1/N samples then summing the N samples. I have no idea how to do this! Could someone walk me thru the steps using Vegas Pro 10?
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That was probably me 🙂
Ok, the let’s say we’re going to take two samples. First thing, you record both samples, however you do that. The key here is that, every time you record from an analog tape source, the random noise is different. An old, failing tape make have some fixed noise built-in, where the media is degrading, but the chroma noise and other undesirables you see from a clean tape are generally random.
So, you have two captures. Drop them in as two tracks in Vegas. Set the top track to 50% transparent. You’re almost certain to have two different starting points, so try to line them up. Looking for a unique audio event is the best way — same idea as aligning video from multiple camera shoots.
Now, if you have the top layer at 50%, and the video lines up, you’ll notice the resulting preview looks normal, but less noisy. That’s the simple idea. Since random noise is random, the noise from each layer comes through at 50% brightness. But the good parts add up, so they’re visible at 100% brightness.
You can get the same effect by creating a compositing pair between the two, lowering the brightness of each by 50%, then adding them, but that’s more complex (and you need to work in 32-bit pixels to ensure you don’t clip when doing this kind of image manipulation).
-Dave
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Thank you VERY much, Dave!! Your explanation makes perfect sense. One could even do three or four takes and the noise would be reduced even more.
I do quite a bit of digitizing old VHS, High8, etc for people and occasionally a “noisy” tape comes in that contains important family history on it. Since there is really nothing that will stop the decaying process of old tapes (like there is for old 8mm & super8mm film – freezing), digitizing should be done with the best results possible TODAY because it will probably be the last time transferring takes place. Your taking the time to explain how this is done will help better preserve families’ heritage.
Again, many thanks!
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