Uplaod a screen grab somewhere. Its hard to know what you are describing.

"Snow" and "horizontal lines" are two different things. Each requires a separate approach. As musicvid said, you will need to post a few seconds of the video somewhere.

The approach I came up with for the moving horizontal lines on those old Kinescopes is pretty unique and (he says, patting self on back) I don't think anyone else has managed to do that before. Snow, on the other hand, has dozens and dozens of solutions, with each of them being appropriate for different types of artifacts. Also, analog consumer video, including S-VHS and Hi-8 (which were better than VHS and 8mm, but still pretty bad), often have other noise artifacts beyond the snow (chroma noise, for instance).

For general snow denoising, many people in this forum like Neat Video. I don't like it at all, but I am apparently a minority of one, so based on the majority opinion in this forum, I'd recommend that you start with that and see what you think. They have a fully functioning trial you can download, although the demo does watermark the output.

Neat Video Download

If you want more ideas, search on this forum under my user name, using the search word "noise." (Yikes, I just checked, and I that search results in over 400 posts, if you go back to the beginning of time. However, I think you will find some useful discussion, with lots of other people contributing all sorts of good ideas.)

Thank you for all the responses.

How do I upload the clips?

Upload them to dropbox or "someplace", and post the links here.

Mediafire is another option.

Thanks... here is the clip..

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/76403687/Snowy%20clips.m2t

Appreciate the help

It's in the original video tape, and it's bad.
You can try to recapture the original video with TBC; may give some improvement, but nothing can overcome the damage to the original tape.

Probably not a lot that can be done at this point without extraordinary intervention, eh John?

The clip is very useful. The problems you have are quite different from the horizontal lines someone else linked to (those were caused by sync issues between the Kinescope camera and the TV display). The clip does have some snow, but that is relatively minor. Here are the major problems, along with what to do about them.

1. The biggest problem is the horizontal tearing. These 1-2 scan line tears emanate mostly from high contrast transitions (you will see very few of them in the flat blue sky). They will be very tough to remove because some of them are not transitory. For instance, the lines that stretch to the right of the tops of the black chess pieces never completely go away. As a result, any software approach to removing the lines will fail because it becomes impossible to distinguish noise from the program material.

The only hope you have is to try transferring again on a better Hi-8 deck or camera, or at least try a different camera. I have equipment to transfer Beta, VHS, and 8mm, but I do not have Hi-8, so I don't know the details of what adjustments can be made. On a VHS deck, you can get artifacts that look very much like these horizontal lines if the tracking control is set wrong. Most decks use automatic tracking, but when I see something like this, I switch to manual tracking and can usually get a decent transfer. Sometimes I have to capture more than once, using different tracking settings each time.

So, the only solution to #1 is to get a better deck, or find someone who has better skills to set up the deck correctly. I suppose it is possible that this bad video is on the tape itself. If that is the case, there is nothing you can do.

2. You do have some snow. This shows up in the dark brick pavement in the foreground. Neat Video or a similar denoiser can take care of that.

3. The video also appears to have compression artifacts. These can be seen as fuzzy areas in the brick pavement. Your video clip was encoded at a ridiculously high 25 Mbps, 1440x1080, in a 16:9 aspect ratio. Is this a clip that you got from the people who did the transfer for you, or did you re-encode for this upload? I suspect that this is a re-encode and that whoever did the original encoding, either used a real-time MPEG-2 encoder (not a good idea) or used too low a bitrate. My recommendation, both for the original transfer and for subsequent work, is to use the excellent DV codec, and only transfer to MPEG-2 when you are ready to transfer to DVD or other permanent storage. When you do that one, final MPEG-2 encode, use the standard definition (4:3 aspect ratio) DVD Architect template, and keep the average bitrate above 6,500,000 bps (and below 8,200,000 bps). Also, for the audio, you don't need anything more than 192K for the audio, if you use the AC-3 stereo settings.

So, bottom line: I'm in the video/film restoration business, and I know of nothing that can improve the horizontal line tearing. Your only hope is to get a new, better transfer. If you are willing to pay me to buy a Hi-8 deck on eBay, I'd be happy to take a shot at it.

You can try to recapture the original video with TBC; may give some improvement, I've never been clear about whether 8mm & Hi8 playback devices always included some sort of TBC, or not. I've read a lot of posts that claim that they do, but I simply do not know. The "fringing" at the left edge of the frame does look a little like a TBC issue, but I don't think that the extremely long lines could be caused by a simple time base offset. Having said that, I actually don't know much about how 8mm and Hi8 video is encoded onto tape.

AFAIK 8/Hi8 is written to tape much the same as VHS,
All are "non heterodyne" systems i.e. nothing is locked. It's so bad some early colour TVs wouldn't display the signal, I had one, made by Philips.

I don't have one in front of me at the moment but I'm pretty certain the GV D800 Sony "Walkman" VCR does have a TBC, there's an option in the menu to disable it...I think, long time since I've looked.

Looking at that video though, yuck. I doubt that's from a camera original tape. It really looks to me like there's errors on top of errors. We used to have a Hi8 camera, I used to make Hi8 dubs on reasonably good gear and I've never seen anything that bad.

Bob.

The video was taken with Sharp Hi8 video recorder but was transfer with Sony TRV340.

I wonder if this has to do with the degraded video?

Probably not.
The TRV 340 has a TBC and DNR. Assuming the Hi8 tape was captured via the firewire port on the D8 camera that's as well as it can be done.

Several possible ways to mess things up:

1) Using a PAL camcorder to capture NTSC tapes or the other way around. I recall some combinations would almost work.

2) Poor storage of the Hi8 tapes.

3) Using "LP" mode to record the tapes.

4) Something wrong with the camera that recorded the tapes.

Bob.

I did a few minutes of Google searching and found two threads over at videohelp.com that demonstrate the same problem:

Sort of black comets' trails in hi8 video

8mm black streaks

You have to wade through a lot of extraneous posts when reading these threads, but the one thing which emerges from both is that you can get this sort of behavior if you play a Hi8 tape in a regular 8mm deck. The camcorder you used for the transfer is Digital8 and theoretically should switch between all three formats. However, if it were somehow fooled into playing the wrong format (i.e., got switched into 8mm rather than Hi8), based on what a few people said in these two threads, that might give you the interference that you are seeing. The solution would therefore be to transfer using a camera or deck that can be forced into playing back in one mode or the other.

One more point about this. I believe that the cassette itself has a notch or something else that notifies the deck what play mode to use. However, there are ways to fool a deck into recording in the higher resolution on a conventional tape (similar to what we did back in the 1980s where we punched a hole in a 720K floppy to make it record 1.44M). This use of regular VHS tape to record a better S-VHS image was done all the time in the later stages of the VHS market with decks that let you record a quasi S-VHS signal on a VHS tape. So, if something like this were done when recording your problem tape, you'll need a deck that can handle that sort of recording.

Another possibility is that your cassette was recorded using the slow (LP) speed. I don't know much about 8mm/Hi8, but many VHS and S-VHS camcorders were not designed to record at the slow speed, and some of them would not play back LP tapes, or if they did play them back, they would do so poorly. This is certainly true of my old Panasonic S-VHS camcorder. As a side note, very few of the VHS VCRs made towards the end of that technology would play back the orphan middle speed (remember the 4-hour mode?), or would do so very badly.

Having looked again at your clip, I am less inclined to think it is a TBC or head problem, or even a tape formulation problem. TBC yield wavy lines; head clogs provide noise across the entire width of the frame at specific vertical positions; and tape formulation or oxide shedding usually shows up as lots of random blips. However your problem only shows up at high-contrast boundaries, and almost doesn't show up at all when there is a uniform intensity, such as the blue sky. Thus, it seems like it is something in how the signal is decoded.

Finally, if you cannot re-capture, there is an AVISynth script that I didn't mention in my first post, but which is referenced in the those two threads I linked to at the beginning of this post. It looks like it can remove a little of the noise, but it is far from magic.

Your best bet is to use a real Hi8 deck. Like Bob said, see if you can rent or borrow one.


[edit]If you read nothing else in those two posts, read this one. The person sounds like he did in fact figure it out. He made his post after the OP had posted an image of the problem, and that image looks just like your video:

It’s typical hi8 tape played on regular 8 camcorder issue ...

I really appreciate the feedback and the pointers. After reading through them, I wasn't sure the finding below could explain for the condition of the video:

The video was captured with Sharp VL-H90E, which I suspect was an analogue camcorder. But it was faulty and couldn't be repaired. Thus I sent the tapes to the vendor to convert them to digital. My understand was that the vendor was using the Sony TRV340, which is a digital camcorder. I was told by the vendor that the play back on the Sony TRV340 already have the horizontal lines. I didn't know how badly until received the video back.

Based on the pointers given and the above, this may be the cause for the degraded video. I suppose the content on the tape still good if I can view from the compatible camcorder.

Does the above make sense?

Your spelling in this last post, and the model number you gave for the capture unit makes me realize that you are using PAL. This doesn't make any difference (all the things I said in my previous posts still apply) but it does mean I can't provide any help by actually transferring tapes (I live in NTSC land, and I only have a few pieces of equipment that can handle PAL).

Yes, it would still be useful to try to rent or borrow a deck that plays Hi8 tapes and see if you can get better playback.