althor1138

I'm using this method.  It was the easiest for me to understand.  Here's a little snippet of the script I'm using.

cpass1=AVISource().trim()
cpass2=AVISource().trim()
cpass3=AVISource().trim()
tootc=twooutofthree(cpass1,cpass2,cpass3).trim(345,0)
spass1=AVISource().trim()
spass2=AVISource().trim()
spass3=AVISource().trim()
toots=twooutofthree(spass1,spass2,spass3).trim(326,0)
mix=overlay(tootc,toots,mode="luma",opacity=1)
p1=mix.separatefields().selectevery(10,0,1,2,3,4,5,6,9).weave().trim(0,1090)
p2=mix.separatefields().trim(2726,0).selectevery(10,0,1,2,5,6,7,8,9).weave().trim(0,2832)
p3=mix.separatefields().trim(9810,0).selectevery(10,0,1,2,3,4,5,6,9).weave().trim(0,2935)

return(p3)

So, it took me 2 or 3 nights but I've finally figured out how to manually IVTC.  I can say with certainty that the JSC/SW must be manually IVTC'ed.  TFM and Telecide fail miserably during the crawl and pan-down.  Once I figured out the order and how to trim the frames properly it's like a clear and stable picture suddenly became visible.  I think my capture card pulls in fields in the wrong order perhaps?  The order on my capture starting with the first frame of the Title card and using separatefields goes like this: 0,1,3,2,5,4,6,7,8,9

Just an update.  I'm still waiting on the video essentials laserdisc to arrive.  The guy from LDDB swears up and down that he mailed it already and that it should be here before the end of the week.

I have been playing around with capturing on the Theater750 and I'm now almost 90% sure that the cld-hf9g does have almost pure composite out. It still passes through the chip that overlays the on screen display but I believe there is no filtering or y/c separation going on. 

If I turn up the y & c noise reduction all of the way and then turn up the Y/C separation all the way to Max and then capture via an s-video cable I get a noise-free picture that still shows grain and a little blur from the 3d y/c separation. There is significant rainbowing however due to the fact that the comb filter is not the best but I haven't noticed much dot crawl problem.

However, If I keep the same settings and capture with the composite out I get a softer picture with more noise but without the rainbowing and no dot crawl.  I'm assuming this is because it is being filtered out with the modern comb filter of the Theater750.

What I've done just playing around is turn off the HF9G comb filter but leave the noise reduction on. Then I did 3 composite caps, 3 s-video caps, toot them respectively and use the luma from the less noisy s-video cap and the chroma without the rainbowing from the composite cap.  It looks pretty nice to my eyes and I don't feel like it needs any more processing other than a proper IVTC.

The difference is hard to spot spatially.  The toot also seems to remove a lot of the rainbowing problem of the s-video caps.  The screenshot below isn't much of an indicator but you can sort of see that the noise is lessened.  I think the best part is that this looks natural compared to using a software denoiser.  There is still grain, nothing looks plasticized, and no dvnr blurring. 

EDIT:  BTW, I should mention that when capturing I didn't have the noise reduction turned up all the way.  I only used the first 2 out of 10 increments. If you turn it up past 7 it starts to blur.

Well I can't find any test patterns on any discs I own so I have ordered a copy of Video Essentials off of LDDB from the Netherlands.  He said it would be in the mail within the next couple days so maybe by next week I'll be able to post some test patterns with the different cards and players.

The Diamond ATI Theater 750HD does come with a composite input as well as s-video.  The connector you are seeing on the back isn't s-video, it is a connector for a break-out cable which has composite,s-video, and stereo audio connectors.

It very well could be a faulty card.  I ordered it used on Ebay.  I suppose it could also be a driver issue perhaps?

I have around 100 laserdisc titles but I have no idea if one of them has a test pattern on it.  I'm thinking I probably should break down and order video essentials or something similar.

Ok here's some screenshots:

First off, I think the PCTV card is unusable to me unless somebody can tell me how to get rid of the constant dropped lines? I think the theater 750hd chipset is several notches above the pinnacle chipsets when it comes to y/c separation and rainbowing. If you look at the finer details of the japanese subtitles it's very apparent imo. The usb stick is almost as good as the pinnacle pci card when it comes to rainbowing.  This surprised me as the stick has a 1 line notch comb filter and the pinnacle pci has a saa7134 chipset with a 4 line adaptive comb filter. I haven't noticed any of the problems with agc on the theater 750 like people have been talking about in the forums online.  I'll admit I'm a total noob and maybe my eyes aren't trained to catch it.  As of now though it seems clear to me that the Theater 750HD is the way to go but I am posting these because I want feedback and suggestions so please feel free to tell me what you think.

EDIT: Viewing the images at full resolution reveals a lot more than these resized images btw.

Just an update on my capture situation:  I now have 3 capture devices and I've even built a new pc that should be able to handle capturing  better than my old one.  My plan is to post a few comparison shots between the different capture devices by the end of next week.  I have the usb pinnacle hdtv 340e stick, the pci pinnacle pctv stereo card, and the pci-e ATI theater 750 HD card.

I would also like to tap the signal and try to capture before the laserdisc player has a chance to digitize anything. I'll probably try this on the cld-d505 because it's a cheaper player than the cld-hf9g and my soldering skills are questionable so I might end up destroying the PCB if I am unlucky.  The laser pickup is basically the same as the more expensive machines anyway.  It's just the filtering afterwards that makes the picture look better I think.

I've done a few preliminary tests and the theater 750 hd card looks impressive.  Of course the only thing i can compare it to right now is the uber-cheap pinnacle stick I was using.  It looks like having a decent capture card really does make a huge difference in the quality of the capture lol.

If anybody has any tips or tricks for capturing feel free to share them :). 

I just watched it and I think the quality is pretty good.  I wanted to say that if you are degraining the video with very strong settings it sometimes doesn't hurt to add grain back in at the end of filtering.  It might help to hide some of the large slow moving grain. If you are using something like mvdegrain there is a multi-threaded version available as mvdegrainmulti which saves a lot of processing time in the long run if you are using the normal avisynth 2.5x release.

I've won the bid on the Pinnacle PCTV Stereo.  I also ordered a new card from Amazon in the states.  It's a Diamond Theater 750 HD.  It's supposedly got a better comb filter than the saa713x chips.  It's got a 5 line 2d comb+3d motion adaptive comb.  The saa7134 on the Pinnacle is a 4 line 2d I think.  I've seen some comparison screenshots with the snell & wilcox pattern online and it looks better there but we will have to see how it pans out in real life I suppose.

I've also been looking through the service manual for the cld-99(cld-hf9g) to see if there is any possible way to bypass the 3d y/c of the player.  It looks to me like the RF signal gets fed into a Digital Video Processor IC where it gets converted to digital and clocked. It leaves this chip exactly like this and goes directly into the 3d y/c chip and then into a few other things like the on screen display overlay chip before going to a DAC and leaving the player.  Unless my HF9G is different than the 99, tapping this digital signal between the processor and the 3d y/c chip is the only way to bypass all of the filter chain and sending it directly to a modern comb filter. Unfortunately, this seems to be a bit over my head and involves some other hardware that I don't understand.

Actually looking a bit closer I see that the signal Y's before leaving the Digital Video Processor chip.  One side exits and goes digitally to the 3d Y/C chip and the other hits an internal DAC on the chip and exits on a pin and then goes nowhere? If this is true I could take the analog signal directly after the TBC and not have to worry about a lot of extra equipment. Is there anybody who can confirm this on the CLD-HF9G or CLD-99? I can send the service manual to anybody that wants it. Here's a picture of the chip. I've tried to trace the video signal in a simple way so it's easy to see.

It occurred to me today that I potentially have a good quality external comb filter sitting right in front of me.  I have a 40" Sony Bravia LCD TV that somehow manages to make anything I run through it look good.  I'm assuming this means it has a good comb filter and a deinterlacer at a minimum.  It can output a signal from the scart connector in composite,s-video, or rgb. This means I should be able to use the tv as a comb filter and pass it on to the capture card via an s-video cable.

Can somebody point me to a list of laserdiscs that have test patterns?  I have about 80-100 laserdiscs but I haven't the slightest clue which might have a test pattern that I can use to see what kind of quality the tv comb filter has.

EDIT: nevermind.  It will output from the tv but it doesn't pass it through the comb filter :(.

EDIT2:  I'm just going to bite the bullet and buy a better capture card. It took me a long time to find a saa713x card here in sweden but I think I finally found one.  Surprisingly it's a pinnacle but it has an saa7134 chipset so I put a bid on it.  We'll see in a day or two if I get it.

I've decided to upgrade my capture card before continuing with this. If anybody can give me some links to some good capture cards I'd appreciate it.  I'm also looking for advice on external comb filters.  This is alien territory for me.  It seems like Faroudja makes some good ones? Apparently there isn't anything that has ever exceeded the X0's comb filter as evidenced here?

EDIT: check page 2/post#43 & 44 if you are interested in that link.

I have to admit I was totally wrong about this in the beginning.  I thought I could just get a raw capture and denoise it to clean up the picture but I've seen that even the best denoiser will not help too much with dot crawl.  It wasn't until I started using a dot crawl/derainbow filter at the top of my filter chain that I started to really see a clean looking picture emerge. I think it helps that I'm using the s-video from my laserdisc player now too.  The comb filter in my usb capture is a 1 line comb filter which is hardly worth using anyway. 

I would like to try the toot filter. I used to have it in my plugin folder several years and many crashes ago.  Does anybody have it that would be willing to share it with me?

Here's the filter set up I'm using now.  I might add the spatial dot crawl filter later too. This script allows me to capture in YUY2 and keep it in the same colorspace all the way down the filter chain without any resizing either.

raw=avisource()

decombed=raw.tcomb(mode=2,fthreshl=5,othreshl=5,fthreshc=220,othreshc=220)

ivtc=decombed.tfm(mode=5,PP=2,clip2=decombed.tdeint()).tdecimate()

vectors=ivtc.mvanalysemulti(refframes=2,pel=2,blksize=16,blksizev=16,overlap=8,idx=1)

denoised=ivtc.mvdegrainmulti(vectors,thsad=200,sadmode=1,idx=2).tweak(sat=1.1).levels(4,1.1,255,0,245)

return(denoised)

Btw.  I tried the little test for rainbowing like you suggested and the only player that doesn't exhibit really bad rainbowing is the HF9G whilst using the s-video connector. It has some but not nearly as much as the other 2 laserdisc players.  They all exhibit rainbowing pretty bad whilst using the composite outputs. Happily, tcomb seems to alleviate most of it.

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 :(.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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

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.

I'm currently an expatriate living in Sweden. 

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

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)

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.

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.