VHS noise reduction techniques

[Jim Arcon]

I don’t know how old the footage is that you are talking about, so let me assume VHS camera originals, probably shot with a consumer-level camcorder. I have done tons of old family video, some of it from the late-70’s. My opinion – it will eventually come down to how much money, time, and effort you are willing to spend to preserve your history.

Let me say this first. I have searched-there’s NO magic button, plug-in, or procedure that will make that wobbly hand-held old camcorder footage look as good as a $50K high-end camera on a rock-solid tripod, and run by an experienced camera op.

You can however, make it look BETTER – sometimes a LOT better! You can purchase some plug-ins that might help here – Vixen or Video Finesse (and others) provide proc-amp type controls within older versions of Premiere. Some of them also have the ability to do some picture noise-reduction.

Here’s what I’m doing: First, I sorted the old tapes by date and divided most of the source material into 45-60minute projects. This is manageable from a hard-drive standpoint, and conveniently fits on a miniDV tape, VHS tape, and of course a DVD. I use a capture card to capture the analog audio and video to hard-drive (as an avi file). The raw material is then opened in Adobe Premiere for clean up. I first go through and pull out all the real junk – start of the tape, low battery, crash-edits, footage (pictures of feet when someone forgot to turn off the camera), 8-minutes of the inside of the camera bag, and other distracting elements. Make this a project by itself within Premiere because you may choose to save the unedited version to DVD.

Then, you’ll need to make some decisions here about how much you want to re-write history – I’ve been careful NOT to start editing out events and people. That boat you couldn’t wait to get rid of in 1988, was the same boat you couldn’t wait to buy in 1987! AND That Nehru Jacket you HAD to have might be embarassing to think about, but everyone will enjoy reminiscing about their crazy fad clothing. Save that footage of Aunt Jeanne’s tumbling into the lake – someday even she will appreciate it.

Then I put some simple titles that indicate the event and date. You might want to identify any place or people that current/future generations might not know. I also put a billboard title at the beginning of the project to indicate the source of the video and any known technical information (camera, microphone, etc) and the date of this transfer.

Then, (and here is where the real time-cost exists), I tweak the video using levels and saturation controls in Premiere. This has to be carefully done on a scene-by-scene basis. There is significant time involved both in the tweaking of the controls and sometimes the rendering time, but with just the levels control can greatly improve some existing-light video. Premiere and AE also have tools to improve color-balance and saturation. Some versions of AE come with a very-good video noise reducing filter that works amazingly well on old VHS. You can even improve some existing-light video.

Premiere allows you to output the timeline directly to DVD, but I prefer to output MPEG2 format for DVD authoring. While you’re are still in Premiere, export some still-frames for your photo album and to use on the DVD case. I use Adobe Encore for authoring, but there are any number of good DVD authoring programs out there. If there is enough room on the DVD, I also store the project files, titles, and artwork used for DVD case and labels. Any notes I made during the ‘production’ go into a 3-ring binder.

Some of the ‘major events,’ like young Jon’s Pinewood Derby victory, older son Jim’s Boy Scout Eagle presentation, or the big Marching Band competition can also be made into a separate program, complete with titles, graphics, music or narration.

If you want to be a real hero, you can make additional copies to hand out to some of the people involved.

One thought – Set yourself a reasonable timeframe to complete each DVD. Otherwise you might tweak your footage endlessly. One other thought – look at this as a long-term labor-of-love where you’ll also learn a lot about shooting, editing, and enhancing your skills. It’ll be a lot more fun

[Lee O.]

Thanks Jim for the response! It made me feel good to know I had considered most of what you detailed. I’ve already done some experimenting with a handful of tapes from the mid 80’s and yes, they are as you describe–shakey, dim, sometimes noisy, often with color from another planet. Some of the later tapes are surprisingly good, however. I’m pretty comfy with my levels adjustments when the lighting was bad, and I’ve gotten quite decent at correcting color and saturation with Matrox’s real time plugin for Premiere Pro (it even has proc-amp controls, which I still haven’t fully explored). Color correction improves the apparent quality more than I would have thought! The auto color balance is nice if you have something in the frmae you KNOW should be white, but doing it manually isn’t so impossible once you get used to identifying in which color direction it is wrong. I suppose it would be ideal if I could afford to have my monitor and Sony TV calibrated professionally, but a calibration DVD is the best I can do at the moment.

Anycrap, my main beef with restoration so far has been with noise (graininess, low frequency color noise, etc.), and I was just wondering if there were any opinions out there on either plug-ins for Premiere Pro, or manual techniques that folks had found successful. Links to other sites on point would be appreciated too.

So are you archiving things to both DV and DVD? At this point I’m leaning toward archiving ALL the footage to DVDs, and archiving the conservatively edited versions to both DV and DVD. Although there is very little loss on a high bitrate DVD (and I am using Encore… gradually), the OCD in me won’t let me archive only to a lossy format. 🙂

[Jim Arcon]

Well, I sometimes get a little crazy about these things and have also archived the original tapes to DV. ….all of them…. Even with hundreds of tapes and dozens of hours of footage, the expense (time and dollars) isn’t really significant when you consider this is the only moving pictures of that part of my family’s history. Some of the tapes are nearing thirty-years old, and I really don’t trust the analog stuff to last much longer. The oxide has begun to dust off of some of the tapes.

I archive all the viewable stuff to DVD and had even considered archiving the captured digital AVI files to DVD. But its tough to fit even twenty-minutes of an AVI on a DVD.

BTW – I also use the RTX100 and the white balance actually works with any neutral shade from medium gray to white.

Noise can be a tough one — I haven’t used Vixen for years, but it had an OK noise reduction tool for Premiere. As you’ve learned, noise reduction is sometimes a bit of a trade-off between noise and blurry image. The better filters also compare the pixels from frame to frame “averaging-out” the noise without noticeable blur.

My favorite noise-reduction filter is the one that comes with After Effects. It is nothing short of miraculous with low-light VHS stuff!

The Sapphire set of plug-ins has a pretty good noise filter, as does Digital Film Tools. I have used them on friend’s systems with After Effects, but I do not know if they are available for PPro. I have not used it, but Synthetic Aperature’s Finesse is available for PPro and has noise-reduction. I think Composite Wizard (maybe Red Giant) has a noise filter, probably only After Effects.

I talk about home-video on my blog at colorburst.com, but a half-hour of googling or here at the COW will yield tons of additional “how to tweak your video” information.

[Jim Arcon]

I was just trialing Magic Bullet Editors for PPro and it does not specifically have a noise filter. However, using the “basic” setting on some noisy video seemed to reduce the noise quite a bit.

Probably has to do with the ‘diffusion’ part of the filter.

[Lee O.]

Thanks for all the ideas, Jim, especially the list of noise reduction software to look at. I also didn’t realize a medium gray would work for the white balance feature. That’ll give me a few more options when tweaking the color.

It’s nice to know someone else likes to archive EVERYTHING. In addition to home videos from the 80’s through today (only the last few years has been on DV), I also did a radio show for 8 years, almost all of which are archived on VHS hi-fi audio, and that’s a whole other archiving project! Oh, and of course I want to digitize the family photos. Hopefully I will finish before I die later this century. It’s the time factor that has me leaning toward just letting my VCR’s noise reduction take care of things and leave it at that.

I’ll definitely check out your website. If you’re bored one day you can check out the site for the radio show I used to do at leeandwolfe.com . There’s even a TV show demo there I did back in the day with Premiere 6 and a 1.2 GHz Athlon system. Ah, the bad ol’ days…