Michael West
Forum Replies Created
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I’ll add to my list of VHS playback problems, some remedies I have, some still looking:
(5) Tape playback rolling: Not sure if this is the right term, but it seems that the tape has tracking problems and the image will show a black “frame bar” that appears in the picture. It’s usually worse than this and most of the image is distorted or not properly visible at all.
This is an example of what I see. It’s usually a line that somewhat diagonal and “rolls” until the picture stabilizes. This used to happen when you had “horizontal hold” lines on very old TVs getting broadcasts over the air. Don’t know of any fix, only minimize. What I do is (1) fast forward tape until end and then rewind it once or twice, hopefully the rolling is caused by loose tape. (2) Manual painful edit. Copy a frame from the previous frame and paste it into the frame you will delete. This way you see two of the same frame together. It’s not perfect but a better viewing experience than a big bar that ruins the fluidity of what you’re seeing.
(2) Interlacing problems: https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRfvk4AwSDg0NY6A4xQk9vJ-Cr9ucFHB7ut-9uI_KlugIufsObL-A
These are ugly. Some video is worse than others. For me, the playback preview in Vegas does not show what is rendered after Vegas can be used to deinterlace (File – properties. Choose “best” for rendering quality instead of the default. Sometimes I still find that my video appears to have horizontal lines in it, like the screen door effect but only horizontal and not vertical. Sometimes I will try to see if changing the field order works in “properties” but that is usually not the problem. Using an external filter like YADIF doesn’t usually make any tremendous improvement over the internal deinterlacing in Vegas although some seem to get good results. Here’s a great tutorial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=UHbR-vjEh-I#!
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I’ve been using both Neat and NewBlueFX for noise reduction. While I like the latter’s output at times for video that has no area to analyze, much of the time I find it blurring out the noise at the expense of the sharpness of the video. No presets in NBFX that I recall either. I think that Neat’s design in having the user choose a sample of video where noise can be easily eliminated and using that as a baseline to remove the noise else seems most effective. That Boris clip is very nice and it’s clear they put a lot of time and effort into identifying all kinds of noise. Impressive.
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I’ve been using Vegas 12 with my GPU. I have the same issue recurring (during playback the preview window will go black or fully red and not recover). Turning off GPU acceleration for rendering works for some strange reason – or it seems to. This problem is intermittent. But for a program that was relatively recently released, I’m not yet nearly disappointed as I would have been had I upgraded to 11 and heard the complaints. Version 10 was rock, rock solid but that was without a GPU and any effects other than Sony’s and a deshaker on occasion.
I’ll report as I do much more work with Vegas than ever before but there are many variables that can come into play – hard drive corruption, bad sectors, hardware, etc. Unless the errors are able to be reproduced by others, one has to look at the hardware.
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Thanks Phil. When you’re dealing with 720×480 video, which is quite small to begin with, I didn’t think you would want to lose any more resolution than is necessary. Hence preserving the sides and not blowing up the image might make for a better viewing experience… but I guess it could be negligible.
I have heard masking out the bottom is much faster for rendering times, which is key when you’re doing as many videos as I am. I can’t find a way to mask out the bottom and then center what I have. If it renders more quickly, this will save a ton of time.
I looked at what I did and it seems I maintained the aspect ratio and simply cropped out the bottom half way and then moved the selection area up to the top. Right now it fits perfectly in the screen and I guess it will do for now. Thanks for your response and good luck with your VHS editing!
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How did you upgrade? Did you deinstall and reinstall? Did you try to install over the existing installation?
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Yes it is a crime. And you’re right again on the media – I checked. The Verbatim BDR media to use is the PLUS series – do not use if it is not the PLUS series. Don’t hold me to it but I spent a few hours researching comments and the experience seems unanimous. Good find on pricing as that is tops right now for Verbatim BDR media.
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I highly agree with John’s recommendation of the Verbatin BD-R media.
Unfortunately technology is now moving completely towards the big marketing scam as the economy becomes more challenging. Marketers don’t think they are lying but, of course, they are misleading us.
First I have the displeasure of trying to figure out why a GTX 6xx series card with 3 x the CUDA cores isn’t the equivalent of a GTX 5xx – that’s apparently because now CUDA cores aren’t comparable by the same manufacturer. Marketing to fool new purchasers. Point of the diatribe? Research this week with BD-Rs for the same reason has revealed that BD-R manufacturers are now reselling low grade media as their own. And unlike the video card problem, you’ll only know for sure whether your “Preemo Quality” brand BD-Rs are made in the good factor or bad factory after you buy, with few exceptions. You can read who made the disc using tools.
Apparently even Sony is using rebranded Ritek media which I’ve heard is lousy for many years. Only Taiyo Yuden was supposed to be high quality DVD quality. Now they are making BDRs branded with JVC as a result of an acquisition – but it is LTH BDR media. I have seen numerous problems with LTH, mostly with legacy BDR players. But still, if you want to be 100% sure you won’t have compatibility problems, I’d avoid LTH media altogether, which I do.
This leaves you with few options. From what I know, Verbatim is one of the few companies that still produces a quality BDR and uses its proprietary AZO dye. These discs should last (not the budget version which apparently there is, something called the Value Series or the like.)
Every other BD-R that I’ve researched is questionable. The Optical Quantum discs that seemed to get good reviews have been ripped over the past six months. Many have reported thinner and lower quality discs. I believe the same with Ritek. Discs manufactured in India are supposed at a much higher fail rate.
There you go… that’s what I discovered. I use Verbatim BDRs for archiving now exclusively, FWIW. And when buying technology, I always assume some marketing person is trying to scam me so one needs to do full research before making an important purchase.
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I’m really thrilled to get it too. As a result, I’m not going to decline the big offer for all 5 plugins and get the two I need with the 30% off coupon today (CYBER2012) and I’ll be thrilled with three packs of NewBlue and the Sampler. It should be more than enough FX for my purposes. Just wish that ProDad Mercalli and Neat were also discounted but NewBlue is what I’ll use gladly. The value looks fantastic for what they do.
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EDIT: Supposedly the Radeon cards are much faster than the nVidia cards, which apparently went for gaming performance and the new Kepler architecture supposedly removed a great deal of the “power” for rendering. The CUDA cores are now no longer comparable – having twice as many cores as the 570 doesn’t make the 660 ti any faster – at least that’s what I read.
Regarding compatibility, even this is open ended and a big question mark. I honestly am more confused than I have ever been and am not even sure what to say except it’s anyone’s guess what’s going on in this industry except too many of these companies are trying to cut corners to fool consumers with misleading and incomparable numbers that supposedly describe a standard.
Thanks everyone for trying to help. I want to get something to significantly improve rendering time over my i7-2600 but it seems that it’s a huge toss up right now. Thank you.
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https://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=833258
Apparently the 6xx series is now supported although one should expect bugs to require being worked out for a while. I’ll stick with the card even though I was tempted to think about returning it. I’m not happy about possible issues, as well as plugins also not being completely compatible from what I hear. I was tempted to think about buying the special for New Blue Video Essentials but it’s still a lot of money and the compatibility issue is one that could make using it a ways off. Will give me a chance to see what else is out there too.