Selur's Little Message Board

My LaserDisc of Communion has light-to-medium laser rot on the image. Here are unprocessed samples from side one and side two.

While I want to preserve a high degree of detail and texture, I would like to eliminate the little video sparkles and short/thin horizontal black lines, which fortunately are not wide scratches.

Suggestions for applying any filter(s) with scripts to the sources in Hybrid are most welcome and appreciated.

I tend to apply one filter at a time to my videos in Hybrid, but if a combination would be more effective, I am open.

Looking at sample 1:
a. source was resized and probably sharpened during capturing :/ (not sure the aspect ratio is quite right, but I ignore that)
b. source is not progressive but probably field shifted (this capturing setting were bad)
c. it has tons of noise
had a quick look at sample 2, has similar issues.

What I would start with:

• overwrite the input scan type to 'field shifted' (this will cause Hybrid ot use TFM)
  
• use QTGMC as denoiser for with input type 2 <- will remove residual combing after the field matching.
  
• use Composite for rainbow removal
  
• use SpotLess with Temporal Radius 2 <- this is for the 'sparks'
  
• Crop the black bars
  

then I would enable Retinex to better see the problems and look at denoising, dehalo, color adjustments,... maybe some stabilization (i.e. Temporalfix),...
not really tuned: https://pastebin.com/mpCp2ia2

You could also add something like DetailSharpen (but then Composite refine should be used with 0 to avoid too much sharpening), which I would then move before Spotless. There seems to be a slight chroma shift (x=1.25)




Assuming the capture is as good as you can manage, the above should give some ideas, but you should decide how much denoising&co you want,.. there are tons of screws and fitlers you can try.

Cu Selur

Oh, thanks so much for all your suggestions! I will consider incorporating each and every one of your filters. I'll probably make a printout of your full scripts for reference.

I should clarify how I did the captures and my setup. So, I don't apply any deinterlacing on the fly while recording my discs. I also disable any filter processing during recording. Alwyn at the VideoHelp forum helped me get AmaRecTV and my capture device installed. He also completed a guide for configuring all the settings. I consult that before performing my captures. The disc was originally a letterboxed/non-anamorphic presentation that I captured at 4x3 with resolution of 720x480.

And since this is film footage that was telecined (and placed on an analog video format), I'm going to execute a TIVTC and convert it from 29.97 fps to 23.976. It looks field shifted because it's all interlaced. I didn't convert any of those sample clips to progressive. They're all raw captures.

I can give SpotLess a try, but lately, I tinkered extensively with the settings in RemoveDirtMC and finally arrived at optimal settings that remove lots of artifacts but doesn't leave the image appearing overly processed at all. Took many hours of experimenting with various parameters and applying them to a Hong Kong movie on LD that had lots of age-related specks and light rot on the LD.

For denoisers, I'm looking forward to trying DFTTest. I did a deep read about that filter and have settings for both moderate denoising and light denoising saved that I can employ.