It wasn't Hi8. It was D8 all the way. D8 tape in a D8 camera. Captured using the same camera as it was shot on. Manual patching isn't practical since it happens about once every second or two for a 40 minute wedding.

I'll try motion blur to see if that helps. Seems like there ought to be something out there that could detect and fix. Any time there is a block of pixels that's green for 80 frames, white for one frame, then green for 80 more should be detectable given appropriate access to the data stream... which I don't have... :-(

JFYI,
If you fast forward and then rewind the tape in your camera before you record, it will reduce possible tape drag and tracking problems caused by stiffness in the tape casette.

Try capturing on another camera, if you can. Sometimes the tape will read on one camera, but not on another, and vice versa.

One trick from the guys on another forum, copy from one deck to another, the theory is that capturing is more critical than making a straight copy. I know it's hard to believe BUT I've rescued stuff by capturing the analogue output from a DV VCR.

Of course the most obvious things to try first:
1) Clean the heads.
2) Try tape in another device. Don't have much choice with D8 although there is a D8 VCR, I'm suspecting it has the same transport and heads as the cameras.

I agree, you'd thing there'd be some smarter tools out there, there's a general lack of widgets that work accross frames apart from high end stuff used by the big boys. I cannot see why they cannot release these tools as non realtime software using the same algorithms. S&W make some truly wonderful restoration boxes that costs more than a house, fair enough the hardware is expensive and they must have a lot of R&D to recover but it seems to me they'd sell a bucket load more if it was say 5% of the price for the software version.
Maybe this is a true conspiracy, heaven forbid if us lowly plebs could do all those wonderful things, the big end of town would be cut down to size.

Or maybe, just maybe this is another example of how we all get screwed by piracy, hardware is much easier to protect but even that's a two edged sword, if the algorthims get leaked then anyone can put out a freeby version as code only and then their market is totally blown away.

Bob.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I'll see if I can borrow another D8 camera to try recapture.

For now I've been playing around seeing if I can minimize the effect. I duplicated the entire track on a track above the original. On the top track, I offset the entire video clip by one frame (since the flashes are single frame, and since there is minimal action on the video). I then cut the alpha on the top channel to 50%. So basically I get a two frame pixel flash, but both frames are 50% bad pixel mixed with 50% correct pixel. Seems to look better. But I haven't done the full render to DVD yet.

Thanks again.

2G

There is a "temporal smoother" filter for VirtualDub. It averages pixels across frames. I've used it a few times and it does a pretty good job of reducing noise ("snow") in analog tapes. It just might help you out, and it is basically free. It's worth a try, anyway.

Motion Blur does much the same thing but you have more control via an envelope. Also the project wide settings control how it is applied. For normal motion blur the default (symetric) is wrong but would be ideal in this situation.

Bob.

If you want to play around with AVISynth, it has a wonderful filter called Despot that is designed to remove dust spots. Here's a sample script:

loadplugin("c:\Program Files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\despot.dll")



AVISource("D:\myvideo.avi")



converttoYV12(interlaced=true)



DeSpot(show=0,p2=2,mthres=9,p1=18,pwidth=20,pheight=20,mwidth=4,mheight=5,interlaced=true,merode=28,ranked=true,p1percent=0,dilate=0,fitluma=true,blur=4,motpn=false,seg=0)

Set pwidth and pheight to the pixel size of your dropout spots.

Do you have a URL for VirtualDub?

Thanks. Is AVISynth part of the base Vegas package? I'm not familiar with it

www.virtualdub.org for the basic application.
neuron.net for a good selection of filters.
www.alparysoft.com/prod/denoise.php is an excellent temporal noise filter.