sharpen digital8 video

joejon wrote on 3/23/2010, 1:45 PM

It seems like my video is not very clear. I'm wondering if it has anything to do with the camera getting old (8 years). Anyway, what is the best way to try and correct the picture? I add some contrast and and then add a sharpen filter with between .15 and .5 sharpening. It seems blocky. What else can I try?

Comments

John_Cline wrote on 3/23/2010, 2:03 PM

Digital8 cameras had a small, relatively low resolution image chip. The chip itself was a little blocky added to the chroma blockiness of the 4:1:1 color sampling of the DVC format made it just barely passable under the best of circumstances. Adding any kind of sharpening to it just accentuates the limitations of the format. My suggestion is to leave it alone.

(I actually liked the Digital8 tape format a lot, the video format was identical to DV and DVCAM and it recorded fat video tracks on relatively wide tape. As a function of physical area of tape recorded per second (230 mm2/sec), it was much better than DV, DVCAM and DVCPRO and was very resistant to dropouts.)

Sebaz wrote on 3/23/2010, 4:37 PM

I wouldn't touch it. I have a lot of D8 tapes and yes, these days on an HDTV they look awful, but if you sharpen them they will look far worse, because they already have some artificial sharpening that exaggerates the edges. It looked great on CRT TV sets, but when it's supersampled to 1080i it makes those edges more visible.

One way to make it more tolerable is to start a project of 1920x1080i, import the 720x480i and render to Sony AVC 1440x1080i (project deinterlace set to interpolate). That smoothes the edges a little bit and it doesn't look so horrible in an HDTV. Or, do a 720x480 project, render to 9 Mbps MPEG2 for a DVD and watch in a CRT TV, that's the best quality for that source.