how to remove a fault line at base of Analog tape capture ?

Hi,
I have captured Hi8 camcorder tapes via firewire to a windows PC.
I see I have a pesky thin line a fraction up from base of video, sparkling away, thickness enough to be a visual pain.
I think best way is to crop it out, but then the shape of the video will no longer be SD 720 x 576.

should I replace that with black and keep the 576 height, how is that done ?

I also have formed the idea that best way for most folk who havent a TV like mine which was bought as it viewed SD far better than most, to view SD footage, is to place it in a larger area of 1920 x 1080, filling the surrounding with black. That way the TV is not stretching and messing SD footage into a space it wasnt designed to fill ! which makes it soft and bad.
IT WILL LOOK EXCELLENT if it sits on a HD TV at its true intended viewing size !
How again is that done, make SD have black around it the project size being 1920 x 1080 ?

I am a newbie to DaVinci Resolve.

For my thin line issue, if I scale the entire video I would lose some at the left and right margins, probably no problem as nothing is shot to be perfect at the sides. However one is then stretching and resampling the pixels to fit new space, thats going to cause resampling issues, the entire tape being resampled, cannot be good for quality retention.

Please advise.

Cheers

DBenz003

Couple ideas.

1. You can use some blanking to add small black bars to the top and bottom of the image, give it sort of a 'widescreen' look. (Timeline>Output Blanking...)

2. You could use SuperScale on the clips and add them to a 1080 timeline, then adjust Zoom as necessary.

And don't forget to work progressive in case the original is interlaced.
The quality loss by a small amount of zoom is negligible if you use SuperScale.

Hi,
I have a prog called Media Info right click a file and choose such and a myriad of info is displayed, choose tree for all data, should tell me if its interlaced.
I would be happy to place a black margin over it, does it have to be also top as well ?

I am very anti resampling of footage, I like to keep things pure.

I also here in this thread and post, put forward my idea of placing black around SD footage for folk wishing to play HD onto HD TV, keeping my footage actual size within that screen.
If anyone expects SD to fill a HD screen and see SD quality they are mad. But play SD at SD size and its gorgeous.

SD is not soft and crappy, it looked ever so good on my Sony Wega, a flat screen in fact CRT rear and the camcorder footage looked great, but to stretch it out to 1920 is wrong.

I just need to black off the very bottom of it.

So how can I place it within a 1920 x 1080 black area and also black off just the bottom, then centre what remains in the 1920x1080 black background ?

DBenz003

You already have your analog tape resampled. Did you ever try Topaz Labs' Video AI? This is the 21st century! I have supervised dozens of restorations of old SD video.
Drop me a PM with an email address and I can send you samples and a review. You might be surprised.

But if you insist on showing a small picture in a black frame on a HD TV, just use cropping in the Inspector. MediaInfo does not know if your analog tape was interlaced or not. It can only see the digital info. Use your eyes.

As Uli says --- Use Topaz Labs' Video AI.

Hardly anyone has a SD monitor in today's world.

Topaz has great results. All of my old SD VHS and 8mm tapes have been converted with Topaz. Many are uploaded to my YouTube channel in HD.. which anyone in the world can view..
Done Deal.

I would be happy to place a black margin over it, does it have to be also top as well ?

Have to? No.

But the symmetry of top and bottom would probably be more pleasing to the eye.

If you do want just the bottom, you can use Crop.

placing black around SD footage for folk wishing to play HD onto HD TV, keeping my footage actual size within that screen.

As a viewer, that would annoy the (bleep) out of me.

Just don't.

What I would do with the single line of dropout is duplicate the video on a track above. Transform that track up or down by a small amount (a single line) and crop the top and bottom of the duplicate track so the dropout of the original track is masked by a good line above or below the dropout.

As a viewer, that would annoy the (bleep) out of me.

and as a viewer seeing the known and remembered to be really good quality (as good as broadcast) SD camcorder footage ruined by being oversampled 266% would annoy the bleep out of me.
For me I hate to see what was good quality footage wrecked by being stretched to a size it wasnt intended for, bit like taking a human face and stretching it out 266% more (1920 / 720)
SD is not supposed to fill a large screen, and if folk want it to, and are more happy with seeing it stretched than caring for the image quality, so be it, but I want my footage seen as it used to be seen, really nice quality.
I played the Hurricane scene at the start of the Battle of Britain move on a HD screen, and couldnt count the rivets, couldnt even count the orifices in the wheel hubs, yet on SD Wega (and my panny flatty HD I eventually bought) I could.

Same as walking out the living room and looking at the TV from the kitchen, SD is great, walk back in and sit close to the stretched image , and yuk. There is no software that can resample and create detail 266%, so my SD will look superb but will have black margins.

Transform that track up or down by a small amount (a single line) and crop the top and bottom of the duplicate track so the dropout of the original track is masked by a good line above or below the dropout.

That might work, the bar is a few pixels thick and up from the bottom so there might be just too much to fill in with a sample of the bottom of the video, I fear.

DBenz

Well, if you insist:
1. Set your timeline to HD
2. Put a solid with video black (16 in 8 bit or 128 in 10 bit) in the timeline.
3. Set input scaling to "Center crop with no resizing" (there will be no crop if the image is smaller).
4. Put your clips on the track above.
5. Crop those lines at the bottom in the Inspector.
6. If it looks shifted to the top now, move it half that amount down in the Inspector.

And then, you've got a PM.

But also have a look at these:
PAL SD: https://www.dropbox.com/s/kvy93e7m1puqu ... V.png?dl=0
Upscaled by TVAI: https://www.dropbox.com/s/kaw8zxwq89q1m ... e.png?dl=0
(This is the 21st century)

Hi, I have captured Hi8 camcorder tapes via firewire to a windows PC.
I see I have a pesky thin line a fraction up from base of video, sparkling away, thickness enough to be a visual pain.

In the old days, head-switching (the squiggly garbage at the bottom of the screen) was visible on Betamax tapes, VHS tapes, 3/4" tapes, and quite a few analog sources. Higher-quality tapes like Betacam and 1" and 2" did not have this problem.

What I generally do on archival footage (without any fanfare) is bring up a little tiny 10-12 line of black only at the very bottom of the screen. Nobody complains, there's no QC issue, and I don't even see it. The alternative is to zoom the entire picture in, which I think is unwise for a lot of reasons.

BTW, there's a fairly huge (I think a $10 million budget) 3-1/2 hour documentary on the life of actor/comedian Steve Martin now on Apple+. There's tons and tons and tons of old 1/2" video and other standard def material in the first 90 minutes of the show... and they sometimes just let the head-switching go. Nobody cares. The information contained in the clip is more significant than the garbage at the bottom.

A bigger question for archival documentaries is often, "should we keep the old footage in 4x3, or should we blow it u to 16x9?" And I think it's a valid argument. They did both in the Steve Martin show, but I think in general they only blew it up when it was of exceptionally good quality. And often the stuff did look surprisingly good.

as a viewer seeing the known and remembered to be really good quality (as good as broadcast) SD camcorder footage ruined by being oversampled 266% would annoy the bleep out of me.

I get that.

Give SuperScale a try.

Hi,

Marc Wielage....What I generally do on archival footage (without any fanfare) is bring up a little tiny 10-12 line of black only at the very bottom of the screen. Nobody complains, there's no QC issue, and I don't even see it. The alternative is to zoom the entire picture in, which I think is unwise for a lot of reasons.

Jim Simon ....
1. You can use some blanking to add small black bars to the top and bottom of the image, give it sort of a 'widescreen' look. (Timeline>Output Blanking...)
2. You could use SuperScale on the clips and add them to a 1080 timeline, then adjust Zoom as necessary.

I see in another clip I also have a black bar within footage at top and it comes up and down with a ragged edge sometimes, so a black bar across top would even up the centreing and cope with that as well.

I dont want to stretch my SD footage to HD screen, I have great misgivings inside me, but as an experiment I will try superscaling, .
Does TopazLabs AI make a bettrer job of resizing SD to HD than daVinci ?

Uli, thanks for the dropbox, it certainly is impressive.

You say use my eyes , I will try it then compare before and after.

When I went to TV shops playing my test SD footage ontot their TV's , as would be when I stick a dvd into a player at home, the result was abysmal. and viewing SD broadcast on other friends TV likewise, so hence my reluctance to make my lovely SD footage look bad on a HD stretched to a size it was never intended for. I just cant believe resampling can add in the missing pixels, but will try out this superscaling anyway.
UK SD PAL 720x576

Doing the maths 1920/720 is 2.67 and 1080/576 is 1.875 so if width is made HD then height gets cropped.
height becomes 1535 so if HD is 1080 then thats 455 lossage or 29.6% of the height. OUCH !!!!

Not sure I want that lossage trying to please folk that want video with no margins on width.

Why by the way when I bring my clips into the media pool does it give me 50 fields per second when they are 25fps (frames per second) when I click the change button , when it asks do I wish to make timeline the same as the clips fps ? (click change if I do wish so)

DBenz

You can't have it both ways:
If you want to cut off those head-switching lines without deinterlacing, all pixels will change their position and you'll get ugly artefacts.
If you deinterlace into 25p, you loose half your temporal resolution.

And then, if your originals are 4 by 3, of course you'll need black bars on the sides, even in HD.

Hi,
I am about to try Topaz Labs Video AI,
Can it cover over the top and bottom of the SD footage, use Topaz rather than DaVinciResolve for that ?
Is Topaz better at that ?
Also the sides are a bit ragged so a neat sharp black edge would be good.
One clip has a green fringe at rhs so again a cover up !

Topaz is better at removing interlacing I am told and I then see.

I wish Topaz did auto glitch removal, save me days of work !

Topaz certainly makes a nice job of improving detail, and removing noise though a little left is good rather than a plastic smooth look.

Grateful to Uli for revealing this.

Cheers

DBenz

Topaz VAI can crop just as good as DR.

As Uli has said deinterlace to double frame rate to maintain temporal motion of the interlace video. Crop just a little from the bottom, upscale to HD and maintain aspect. Topaz AI can do all this in one go. You will get a 4:3 progressive image in a 16x9 picture for your TV with black bars each side. The current Topaz is much faster and that is how I am currently recovering my old tapes.