-
Perhaps the most hopeless project ever
I have what is perhaps the most hopeless project to edit. I friend started it a few years ago & wasn’t able to finish it. The video was captured at full Pal DV resolution of 720×576 & is stored on a portable hard drive that I can plug into my USB port.
It was recorded on an old VHS-C camera. The camera a JVC I think was supposed to have image stabilization but for it to work it had to zoom in little & the result of this is that it puts a black box around all of the AVI’s. So the already poor VHS quality is made worse my having to zoom in a little using track motion. The original video didn’t have a time code so it had been put through some optical scene detection program which had cut it into individual clips which would have been nice if it weren’t for the fact that the program has placed the first frame of the next clip onto the current frame, which means the end point of every frame is out by one frame.
The camera apparently had a zoom bug in it because every time it tried to zoom back it hesitated foe just a moment before moving back & while this happened it popped out of focus. So I’ll have to trim every zoom out clip as well. The odd scene has also apparently been put through some other stabilization program, perhaps Steadyhand, or the Deshaker filter with VirtualDub which made the image more stable alright but zoomed in on the image a little more with the result that the black border edges are moving all over the place.
Before I waste too much time on this hopeless project I just thought that I would ask to see if anyone had any suggestions. Because the poor image quality I wondered if I would be better off saving the clips when it’s finally rendered as half MPEG2 resolution 360 x 288. Would this help? I though of using more clips than I might normally use in a project. & to try to get around some of the quality problems would use track motion to have 4 images at once. Should I bother zooming in at all to overcome the cameras stabilizer mask? Can any of the sharpen filters help? I have found then quite effective when using these filters on stills in Photo enhancement programs but have never seen any sharpening done in Vegas that looked good. maybe I just don’t understand the Vegas settings.
Thanks in advance
-
3 Replies
-
Hi TOF
Why are you taking this one on – what do you hope to achieve?
Does the film have a script / story to tell which is intriguing, even interesting – something to make it worth your efforts, given the visual problems?
And how long is your finished edit going to be? Delivered in what format?
In your situation, if the project really feels worthwhile completing (even for cash reasons), I might be inclined to cut it fast and tight, no picture correction at all – just tell the story as well as you can, as short as you can. Look for really strong, appropriate music to enhance the mood. And if the shots are poor, don’t hold on to them – cut really quick, repeat shots if you have to, maybe use a music or story rhythm to motivate cuts.
Then when you have it down to length, look for a style / series of visual devices that might get your rubbish pictures off the hook …. shrinking picture to 50% or 25% “boxes” often helps poor source. Can you play with putting up multiple small picture streams ..? It can faster to do that with straight picture “boxes”, but maybe you could make up some soft, curvy (maybe moving) alpha channels and key the footage through them, to give the multi-image effect something extra …
Then maybe do something dramatic and stylish on the picture processing side, so that it seems like your film has a “look”, rather than just an amatuer feel … hmm.
Good luck!
-
The objective is just to give the family something on a DVD which will remind them of their overseas trip.
The original is only of a family trip to Europe. As with most videos I find that about 80% of sound is unusable due to outside irrelevant sounds. Little of the original audio is usable it’s just best to delete it all & then just use paste repeat for the few audio clips that are usable. I will add titles, transitions & if the owner wishes he can dictate his original memories onto the time line.
I’m also add music & any stills they might have taken at the same time as the video. I was also thinking to putting a suitable high quality background & then shrinking down all of the video to help make the poor video quality less noticeable.
Thanks in advance
-
Canopus has some hardware for cleaning VHS while digitizing. Check that out. You might find adding a few Vegas filters like contrast and unsharp masking will help. Sample a section to Mpeg2 and see what that looks like – usually an improvement all by itself.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up