Part 2: The Comb Filter

An excellent comb filter is needed to split the luma and chroma of the Pioneer CLD-1010's "pure" composite video output. Unfortunately, the one that's included with my capture card of choice (see Part 3) is pretty bad.

I find 3D comb filter artifacts (e.g., checkerboarding on fast shot-changes and smearing) more objectionable than the composite video artifacts (e.g., cross-color) that a 3D comb filter is designed to remove from stationary frames. Frankly, I'd rather see rainbowing than smearing.

The last thing I'd want to do is introduce a temporal anomaly (e.g., smearing) that can't be fixed later. OTers who love 3D comb filters can always use a Leitch DPS-475/575 or tritical's TComb on the raws I'll be posting to Usenet.

Now, poita suggested the Extron YCS-100 and I agree with him that it's the best standalone 2D comb filter available: Adaptive 2D, 5-line; 10bpp processing; full chroma resolution; and a time base stabilizer to boot. Hell, it even manages to do a rather good job with the S&W Zone Plate which is really a better test of 3D comb filters than 2D ones.

Here's a hyperlink to the brochure: http://media.extron.com/download/files/brochure/ycs_100bro.pdf