If you do a search on my name and search for "CNR," you will find a way, using AVISynth, to almost eliminate all the chroma noise that dominates VHS tapes, especially those made at slow speed on older equipment.
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No he won't.

Despite my post, the search engine is just as broken as it was when I first posted it. That search will only work with the choice to search within the "last 6 months" as an option. With that option it will pull up two threads. This one and a similar one from January.

Search back any farther than that and you will get the following message:

Your search was too broad, please narrow your search options and try again.

John

Maybe someone sacrificed a copy of Vegas Pro 8 to the search demons tonight :-)

8mm Video 8 capture and using AVISynth help

Mike

Sheesh,
How did you do that?

John

Thanks for finding that. Like John, I've had no luck with the search engine lately.

That old post of mine includes everything but the kitchen sink and is therefore intimidating. The only thing you need are these three lines:

loadPlugin("c:\Program Files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\CNR\Cnr2.dll")
AVISource("D:\Frameserver.avi")
Cnr2("oxx",8,16,191,100,255,32,255,false)

Put the path and file name of your video file in the second line.

With all respect folks,
I thought this was a - the - vegas forum.
Now it only seems that if I reaslly want to do something I have to use a workaround with other programs - install them, learn to use them, find out that the're not as easy to use as vegas, etc. etc. etc.

I have some old VHS tapes too. Want to put them on PAL DVD.
I just want to use Vegas.
So what's the best strategy to improve the quality in Vegas? Can you advise me which (chain of) video fx to use?

I'd be very thankful.

Harrie

Hi,

Yes, you can do it in Vegas, but you probably need a good DNR plugin, since Vegas unfortunately lacks one. Luckily, such plugins exist, even as freeware. I have used the "Dynamic Noise Reduction" filter for Sony Vegas by Mike Crash. You can find it on:

http:// mikecrash.wz.cz

This filter works nicely even with Vegas Pro 8, even if the filter itself is quite old. I quote:

"This filter removes noise, filtering is done across time axis. This filter is based on DNR filter for VirtualDub and is MMX optimized, so MMX capable processor is required K6/Athlon/Duron/Pentium/Celeron). "

There might be other filters, but this works well, and is really good in removing color noise! You just need to boost the colors a little, either before or after the filtering. Do some experimenting wich way gives a better result.

Christian

http://mikecrash.wz.cz does not seem to be a valid site.

But I did find this site which looks to be his: http://www.mikecrash.com

But the link to the filter is non-working:
http://www.mikecrash.com/vegdnrsrc.zip

Thank you Christian,

I have used the DNR plugin before, and I like some experimenting too, but some preset chain might help.

On a Dutch Vegas forum, I just found a tutorial on improving old S8 film, which I will try to summarize:

1) first improve brightness and contrast by using LEVELS fx., monitoring the process with the Videoscope Histogram (Lumincance/R/G/B): make sure all 4 histograms use all 255 channels; U might have to introduce LEVEL two times (for all channels and after that green or blue) to reach the effect.

2) further improve brightness and contrast using COLOR CURVES, also monitored by the Histogram. (The turorial sais: experiment, it does not add much in old films).

3) Correct colors using COLOR CORRECTOR, monitored by Videoscope Vectorscope (for PAL: uncheck Studio RGB in the videoscope settings): first correct the white balance and after that the mid colors (gray, white skin) and low colors (black).

4) sharpen the film: duplicate the video track (including fx and all - right click on the track control) and add CONVOLUTION KERNEL to the topmost track. Choose the preset sharpen or experiment with manual settings. After that set the opacity of the topmost track to 50%

5) add some final improvement by experimenting with the compositing mode of the bottom track (i.e. difference squared).

This is the website link: http://www.videomontagefaq.nl/index.php?action=artikel&cat=374226&id=331&artlang=nl
but I'm afraid none of you can use it, because it's written in Dutch.

I quickly tried it out on a short scene and my first impressions are that this chain really improves the result.

Where in the chain should I use the DNR filter ?

Are there any other suggestions?

Harrie

With this link you go directly to the download page. You can also download some other filters from here:

http://www.mikecrash.com/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=viewdownload&cid=13

Harrie

If you want to do everything in Vegas, you can certainly do that, but you won't get as good results. This is true not only of this topic, but dozens of others as well. No single program in any category, from spreadsheets to video, can do absolutely everything, even with plugins.

To my knowledge, there is nothing like the chroma filter available for Vegas (which is why I made my earlier comment), and since chroma noise is the number one problem with VHS captures, if you choose not to try to use one of these non-Vegas programs, you will be missing out on the single most important thing you can do to improve the results.

But, it's your choice ...