Laserdisc capture workflow.

I've been inspired recently by some of the laserdisc captures going on here and I've decided to capture the JSC,DC,SE, and the first P&S release that I own. I am not planning on resizing or color correcting anything (even the red shift of the SE). I am not trying to sync with another release I just want to have a nice looking digital backup of my star wars laserdiscs.

I am armed with free software (avisynth,virtualdub,etc.), a usb capture card, and 3 laserdisc players of varying quality(CLD-HF9G,CLD-D505,CLD-D615).

My planned workflow is as follows:

1.) Capture YUY2(Lagarith)

2.) Splice sides together. Encode into 1 file.

3.) Field ordering(TFM). Denoising(MVDegrainmulti).

4.) Deinterlace(Qtgmc 3.32)

5.) Decimate (Tdecimate). Sharpen (maybe, not sure if it's needed or wanted yet).

6.) Crop. Addborders. (I've done this here because I wanted to deinterlace and sharpen the burned in subtitles of the JSC and then crop away all of the black areas and add them back with pure black borders. Otherwise, I would have made this step #3 or something like that.)

7.) Audio alignment.(Planning on using the raw audio files from the Laserdisc Audio Archive)

8.)Encode Mpeg-2 with high as possible bit rate. Burn to DVD.

If anybody has a better method or just wants to point out something I'm doing totally wrong please let me know.

UPDATE 03/17/2013:

I think I will make a revised list here of the steps I plan on taking so that anybody who wishes to embark upon capturing laserdiscs can get an idea of how I decided to do it and use it for themselves or improve upon it. 

1.) Acquire the best Laserdisc player/capture card combo that you can.

2.) Capture the Laserdisc in YUY2 colorpsace. Try to capture with settings that don't crush or blowout information.

(YV12 colorspace messes up the chroma when you IVTC)

3.) Concatenate the sides

4.) Perform manual IVTC

(IMO automated IVTC will never do a perfect job)

5.) Set white and black levels/adjust contrast and saturation if needed.

6.) Sync audio files.

(I used an external audio file so sync was necessary.)

7.) Encode and burn to media of your choosing.

I'm sure there are many different ways to approach this but I feel like these steps are quite mandatory if you plan on digitizing a laserdisc film.

IVTC instead of deinterlacing.

Moth3r said:

IVTC instead of deinterlacing.

the TFM and TDECIMATE filters should do a reasonable job at IVTC'ing but I've noticed a few things here and there that show jaggies so I added the Deinterlacing.  Do you think I should IVTC before Deinterlacing or just not Deinterlace at all? I've been using QTGMC because it's fairly automated, and it's also a good denoiser in the sense that I don't have to worry about it removing much detail.

althor1138: Automatic IVTC works excellently most of the time.

With that being said, it will likely prevent any chance at GOUT-sync.

I strongly believe that you should release any/all of your captures at their original 29.97fps and let others (or yourself) develop IVTC scripts for them at a later time.

Also, you may want to crop and add borders before concatenating the sides.

Many LDs require different crop-values for each side.

althor1138 said:

Moth3r said:

IVTC instead of deinterlacing.

the TFM and TDECIMATE filters should do a reasonable job at IVTC'ing but I've noticed a few things here and there that show jaggies so I added the Deinterlacing.  Do you think I should IVTC before Deinterlacing or just not Deinterlace at all? I've been using QTGMC because it's fairly automated, and it's also a good denoiser in the sense that I don't have to worry about it removing much detail.

A good solution to remove any "jaggies" is:

source.EDDI2(pp=3).TurnLeft().EEDI2(pp=3).TurnRight().ResampleHQ(source.width, source.height)

AntcuFaalb said:

Automatic IVTC works excellently most of the time.

With that being said, it will likely prevent any chance at GOUT-sync.

I strongly believe that you should release any/all of your captures at their original 29.97fps and let others (or yourself) develop IVTC scripts for them at a later time.

I could release the raw captures but I don't feel that they would add anything to the community.  These have all been captured on far superior equipment.  I'm actually trying to avoid any GOUT syncing lol. I'm really just concerned with making a presentable digital copy. If anybody is interested in them though I can think about it when I'm all done.

AntcuFaalb said:

Also, you may want to crop and add borders before concatenating the sides.

Many LDs require different crop-values for each side.

Normally I'd agree but since there are burned in subtitles that I want to have processed along with the picture I opted to do it further down the chain just to make it simpler. At least it seemed simpler to me at the time.  I want to process the burned in subtitles and then separate the top part containing the film and crop the borders around that accordingly and on the bottom part containing the subtitles I was going to set levels something like this (16,1,17,0,255) and try to make everything that isn't subtitle totally black and then everything that is subtitle totally white. Then I'd stack them together again and hopefully have crisp white subtitles with a true black (noiseless) background. That was my plan anyway.

I don't want to do any resizing or colorspace conversions if at all possible. (Maybe qtgmc does. I'm not sure. I guess I'll go check the filter chain in that function now lol.)

A good solution to remove any "jaggies" is:

source.EDDI2(pp=3).TurnLeft().EEDI2(pp=3).TurnRight().ResampleHQ(source.width, source.height)

althor1138 said:

I could release the raw captures but I don't feel that they would add anything to the community.  These have all been captured on far superior equipment.  I'm actually trying to avoid any GOUT syncing lol. I'm really just concerned with making a presentable digital copy. If anybody is interested in them though I can think about it when I'm all done.

Ah, I understand.

I didn't realize that you weren't planning on distributing them.

I'd gladly share them with anyone that is interested.

althor1138 said:

I'd gladly share them with anyone that is interested.

That's awesome of you.

Do you live in the US?

I'm currently an expatriate living in Sweden. 

althor1138 said:

I'm currently an expatriate living in Sweden. 

That's awesome. You, msycamore, and You_Too should all meet up!

Which state did you move from?

AntcuFaalb said:

althor1138 said:

I'm currently an expatriate living in Sweden. 

That's awesome. You, msycamore, and You_Too should all meet up!

Which state did you move from?

Lol, I moved from Florida. That would be crazy to meet people who are advocates of the original trilogy from this site.  Especially here in Sweden. Most people look at me like I'm crazy when I tell them the films aren't the same anymore lol.  I don't know where they live but the chances of them being in the same area are probably not good.  Sweden is a pretty big country actually.

althor1138 said:

AntcuFaalb said:

althor1138 said:

I'm currently an expatriate living in Sweden. 

That's awesome. You, msycamore, and You_Too should all meet up!

Which state did you move from?

Lol, I moved from Florida. That would be crazy to meet people who are advocates of the original trilogy from this site.  Especially here in Sweden. Most people look at me like I'm crazy when I tell them the films aren't the same anymore lol.  I don't know where they live but the chances of them being in the same area are probably not good.  Sweden is a pretty big country actually.

My wife grew up in Florida. I've been on holiday there a few times. Nice place.

Despite the distance, ya'll should meet up! OTcon 2013 in Sweden, baby!

I miss Florida sometimes. Especially in the winter here. I have to take Vitamin D here just to feel normal lol.

althor1138 said:

I miss Florida sometimes. Especially in the winter here. I have to take Vitamin D here just to feel normal lol.

I can't stand heat and sunshine.

I sunburn in <15 minutes, have light-sensitive eyes, and I sweat too much.

I prefer to stay inside. I may be a vampyre.

So today I want to try and capture my P&S. It is time-compressed. What is the best method for capturing a time-compressed laserdisc? Is it possible to recover the frames in a progressive structure?

althor1138 said:

So today I want to try and capture my P&S. It is time-compressed. What is the best method for capturing a time-compressed laserdisc? Is it possible to recover the frames in a progressive structure?

Unfortunately, I know nothing about time-compressed LDs.

I've been reading some various sources about time-compressed video today.  It sounds like there is going to be blended frames that are maybe not recoverable.  I'm going to try capturing side1 either today or tomorrow at 29.97fps and see what it looks like.

I am planning on using HCenc 0.25 for encoding to mpeg2 unless I find something better.  Do I understand correctly that if I give it a file at 23.976 fps it is going to convert it to 29.97fps anyway before it encodes?  If this is the case I'm thinking that I shouldn't Decimate the original 29.97fps file down to 23.976 and just encode it as it is.  Thoughts?

althor1138 said:

I am planning on using HCenc 0.25 for encoding to mpeg2 unless I find something better.  Do I understand correctly that if I give it a file at 23.976 fps it is going to convert it to 29.97fps anyway before it encodes?  If this is the case I'm thinking that I shouldn't Decimate the original 29.97fps file down to 23.976 and just encode it as it is.  Thoughts?

You can encode it with the ntsc_film framerate (23.976fps) after IVTCing. This allows you to use a higher bitrate because you're not wasting space on duplicated fields.

Your DVD player will do the pulldown in this case. NTSC GOUT is encoded this way.

AntcuFaalb said:

Your DVD player will do the pulldown in this case. NTSC GOUT is encoded this way.

Thanks.  That is exactly what I wanted to know.

althor1138 said:

AntcuFaalb said:

Your DVD player will do the pulldown in this case. NTSC GOUT is encoded this way.

 

Thanks.  That is exactly what I wanted to know.

You're very welcome, of course.

althor1138 said:

I am armed with free software (avisynth,virtualdub,etc.), a usb capture card, and 3 laserdisc players of varying quality(CLD-HF9G,CLD-D505,CLD-D615).

I suggest to do three captures for each title, using your three laserdisc players; align them temporally (I think there is no need to align them spatially too, as you'll you the very same title and not different copies); then average and/or median the three captures to obtain a cleaner picture with less noise; you may use TOOT too, but it will not clear out droputs, as you are using the same copy and not different copies (that may have video dropouts scattered in different places).

I've decided to start over lol.  I'd only captured one movie anyway.  Since I'm using a cheap pinnacle usb capture stick I think there either isn't a comb filter in it or it's the crappiest comb filter ever.  I'm thinking that this could be an advantage though because there are software based comb filters that I can use right? The dot crawl and rainbowing is quite bad.  I'm not impressed when i capture with the s-video either.  I've tried a few settings with Tcomb in avisynth and it seems to be pretty good actually.  Does anybody have any other suggestions or alternatives to Tcomb? Until I can get the capture through a good comb filter I'm afraid averaging several captures to reduce noise would in fact create more noise :(.