[Lee O.]

In case you’re still looking for help on this…

I tackled a similar problem several years ago on a radio show I used to do with NO BUDGET. The station was temporarily located in a small studio in the hallway of a college classroom building made of cinder blocks. The echo was horrible. However, we wanted to broadcast live band performances in that hallway. The answer was creating a virtual room around the band with heavy blankets and quilts. Ugly, but it works like a charm. In your case in a warehouse you may need to construct something to hang the blankets and quilts on. Put them on all six sides of the virtual cube around your subject. As long as they’re off frame, who cares? Of course, your lighting and green screen will have to be inside the “quilt cube.” Cheap solution to your echo problem!

[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…

[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. 🙂

[Lee O.]

Maybe field order is something I should look into. I definitely had the NTSC encoder setting correct. The audio had to be converted from 12bit (this wasn’t *MY* video work!). It just went SLOW and came out completely wonky. Could a Matrox codec incompatibility cause this? When I used the Matrox export to disc plugin, it went FAST (real time) and looked great, but didn’t burn to disc. It only created an m2v file and wav file. I haven’t used Encore more than once yet to know the right way to import those files, apparently. I tried it in Encore, and it made an unplayable disc from the Matrox export. I’ll fiddle with it some more.

[Lee O.]

I chose the highest quality encoding available that didn’t mention surround sound. It was 7Mb CBR. And it’s not that my encoding had bad quality, it’s that it was WRONG. Warped, warbly, and, well…. wrong. I’m wondering if it’s some subtle incompatibility with Matrox’s DV codec. When I used Matrox’s “export to disc” plugin, like I mentioned, that encoded properly and very fast (exactly real time), but I had to use Sonic MyDVD to make the disc, since I as yet have no idea how to make a DVD with Encore from a .m2v and .wav file created by the export.

I’ll just have to start from scratch now that I’m not in a hurry to get that specific disc made, and see more fiddling with settings can make it work, and see how to PROPERLY use Encore with Premiere. I’m totally new to Encore. If Encore will properly take the files that Matrox’s plugin makes from the Timeline, that’d be nice since it’s so much faster.

[Lee O.]

Replying to my own post for an update. Thank you for the two responses so far. The burning to DVD from the Premiere timeline ended up taking a few hours overall. When it was complete, the DVD was horrible, with wavy, blocky pattern throughout (not compression artifact, but serious jerky patterned blobs. It’s as if Premiere spent hours to calculate the worst possible DVD. I went back and used Matrox’s own export to disc feature (which only exports it to a file, and doesn’t actually burn it for some reason, but it did it in real time), then I used the dinky little Sonic My DVD burning program that came with my DVD burner. That worked, but without chapter markers since Sonic has no idea how to do that. So I got a DVD with nice picture quality, but with a menu I didn’t want at the beginning with one item, and no chapters. I’m angry that my $900 worth of hardware and software couldn’t do a very simple function. I’ve read in this forum where people are having trouble making a DVD from the Premiere timeline, which disappoints me since I could really use that feature often, despite the fact that I also have Encore.

Any ideas? Has anyone found a Premiere patch? Or should I just start learning how to actually use Encore and integrate it with Premiere?