Selur's Little Message Board
[HELP] Processing tips? - Printable Version

+- Selur's Little Message Board (https://forum.selur.net)
+-- Forum: Talk, Talk, Talk (https://forum.selur.net/forum-5.html)
+--- Forum: Small Talk (https://forum.selur.net/forum-7.html)
+--- Thread: [HELP] Processing tips? (/thread-4272.html)

Processing tips? - bap2012 - 29.11.2025

Hi all,
I'm pretty much brand new to processing analog video, so I would like to get an idea of what you guys do with your raw captures to get them to the final product you share with family.
I plan to deinterlace with QTGMC and Bob to get it to 60fps, I have tested this before and it is wonderful. The other thing I have become more aware of though is video noise. How should that be handled? I have used Neat Video to clean up digital HD video when recorded in dark environments, but it was very glitchy and unreliable in my experience. Amazing when it worked but more often it would bug out and crash Premiere or just simply stop filtering the video after about a minute worth of video was processed.
Given my experience with Neat and the fact that I will already be using Hybrid for deinterlacing, I would like to just do the denoising in Hybrid as well. Any tips for this? What to look out for, when to use which tool? Some general, good solid settings?
And do I have to do multiple runs of processing, or can I do the deinterlace, denoising, and whatever else all in the same run without taking some hit on quality? I read somewhere that denoising before deinterlacing wasn't good. 

I have attached some brief lossless (sorry for the huge filesize) clips as examples of some of the home videos, these ones I'm working on now are 8mm till I can get my SVHS VCR working again and capture my VHS tapes. Brief descriptions:
071 is of a stage play, so it's pretty dark in there and shaky motion.
073 is in a dark bedroom, very noisy of course.
077 is outside during the day but very shaky.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1sMPlTyP1nYVFhjff5-U1-a1CNQBX0_Ui?usp=sharing (had to use gdrive because AVI is not allowed on the forum attachments, I will leave them in my drive as long as I've got space though. Download files to view)

Examples 73 and 77 are probably about as extreme as it gets in terms of noise and motion of what I'll be processing, and 71 is a middle ground. 

Anyway, just wanted to throw this out there and get some opinions, thoughts, and tips for processing and what kind of settings I should go with. I don't want to go too crazy down the rabbit hole even more than I already have, but I of course would want to deinterlace and try to denoise/degrain.

tl;dr: What do y'all do for processing 8mm captures, or tape captures in general?

RE: Processing tips? - Selur - 29.11.2025

side note: I moved the thread to the 'Small Talk'-subforum.

Looking at 077:
For general processing, I would:
  • overwrite the scan type to "top field first", so that Hybrid will automatically deinterlace the source
  • enable 'Auto White' or 'Gray World'
    [Image: grafik.png]
  • crop all black bars
  • add a sharpener i.e. "CAS(strength=0.7)", idrectly after the crop (filter order needs to be adjusted for this)
    [Image: grafik.png]
    you maybe might want a lower the strength to 0.5
  • add EdgeFixer "edgefixer.Continuity(clip, bottom=8, radius=3)" behind the crop, but before CAS (filter order needs to be adjusted for this)
    [Image: grafik.png]
    maybe additionally setting top=4.
About denoising&co, this often comes down to personal preferences.
Personally, I don't think the source is that noisy, I would probably just use something like SMDegrain "smdegrain.SMDegrain(clip, tr=3, contrasharp=30, interlaced=False, opencl=True, device=-1)":
[Image: grafik.png]
or one of the other Degrain filters.
Depending on what you are aiming to do, with the output of Hybrid, adding BasicVSR++ (applied on Chroma only; note: BasicVSR++ requires an NVIDIA gpu and the torch add-on)
[Image: grafik.png]
You could also apply some denoising and restrict it to the darker areas (using a LimitMask)

Will look at the other sample later, just found a bug I need to fix first.

Cu Selur

RE: Processing tips? - bap2012 - 29.11.2025

I really appreciate you taking the time to not only create this incredible software, but a forum as well and taking time to answer questions and whatnot. Cannot thank you enough for that and for all you've shared already here! I will definitely take all that into account, and do some experimenting myself now that I have an idea what settings you made adjustments with.
The one you looked at, 077, is probably going to be one of the least noisy/grainy since it was filmed outside so light was abundant. As you'll see in the other two though, it can get noisy filming indoors.
Since these tapes can have many different scenes with different lighting conditions and therefore amounts of noise/grain, I just aim to get a base level denoise and sharpen that I can use on all the videos since there are a couple hundred hours worth to process, and I'd like to have as little interaction as possible with the computer once I let it start the queue and let it go. Not going for absolute perfection, just want an improvement over the original if it's worth the effort. Know what I'm trying to say? Wink If it'll be too much effort then I just won't worry about the denoising part. And of course I'm keeping the master AVIs so if some better process comes along in the future, I can always process again.
Also, my bad for posting this in the wrong section originally, I misinterpreted what the "small talk" section was, thought it was for non-Hybrid related talk rather than non-bug Hybrid related talk *facepalm*

RE: Processing tips? - Selur - 29.11.2025

Took a quick look at 073.
Dark noise such as this will require some heavy denoising.
try something like:
a. mClean (adjust values to your licking)
[Image: grafik.png]
b. MC Temporal Denoise, with preset 'very high' (adjust values to your licking)
[Image: grafik.png]
c. SCUNet (mlrt) / SCUNet (require a fast gpu and the vs-mlrt or torch add-on)
[Image: grafik.png]
other denoisers will not be strong enough, and the setting used for such content should probably not be applied to daylight content.

Cu Selur

Ps.: If you want to use one filter chain for all, mClean is probably the best of those.

RE: Processing tips? - bap2012 - 29.11.2025

Quote:other denoisers will not be strong enough, and the setting used for such content should probably not be applied to daylight content.
Is there by chance a way to pick and choose points in the video where one set of filters will apply, and then a different set for other parts? 
The amount of cleanup those filters achieved on that scene is great! I will be playing with those for sure.

Also I forgot to mention, the machine I plan to use for the processing is a laptop I have, it has an i5-13420H and RTX 4050 GPU, so it would be able to run that one filter you mentioned that required one  Smile I also have my desktop with a Ryzen 5 5600 and AMD RX 5700 XT which I may use alongside the laptop. Doesn't seem like that GPU will be of much, if any use for this though.

RE: Processing tips? - Selur - 29.11.2025

Quote: Is there by chance a way to pick and choose points in the video where one set of filters will apply, and then a different set for other parts?
By enabling 'Filtering->Vapoursynth->Misc->UI-Show 'Apply only to'-controls' there's an 'ApplyOnlyTo'-Groupbox next to each filter, which lets you specify where the filter effect should be applied.
There are a quite a bit more controls available, then there are visible by default:
[Image: grafik.png]

You can try the vs-mlrt add-on it supports different GPU architectures, the torch add-on only works with NVIDIA.

Cu Selur

RE: Processing tips? - Selur - 29.11.2025

The 071 clip seems like it was not captured properly, like the content was interlaced and deinterlaced and reinterlaced and somehow this was messed up.
looking at the fields
[Image: grafik.png]
[Image: grafik.png]
those lines should not be there,... or I image the natural look quite different than it is. Smile

Cu Selur

RE: Processing tips? - Selur - 29.11.2025

For 071, for start I would:
  • overwrite the scan type to "top field first", so that Hybrid will automatically deinterlace the source
  • set "Misc->Script->Filter interlace handling" to "separate fields"
  • Frame->AntiAliasing->Santiag and move it above the deinterlacing (filter order needs to be adjusted for this)
    [Image: grafik.png]
    Problem is to get rid of those color lines one looses some sharpness
  • adding a sharpener i.e. "CAS(strength=0.7)", before Santiag lessens this a bit (filter order needs to be adjusted for this)
  • add SpotLess.SpotLess(clip, rec=True, pel=1, smoother="zsmooth")
from the look of it, the input should be PC not TV scaled, so you will need to do some color adjustment,..

Cu Selur

RE: Processing tips? - bap2012 - 29.11.2025

Regarding what you said about 071, I don't even have the slightest clue what went on with that to make it so messed up... it isn't like these tapes were duplicated or anything (really doubt my mom or aunts would've had the know how and equipment to do this with 8mm) so I don't know how to explain the messed up fields. I will have to review that footage later and see if I notice the same thing going on for the rest of it, maybe I will try to recapture if so.
Thanks again for all the advice!! I will probably come back and post an update once I get to playing with the program more Smile I have a lot to learn of course but this has been a good starting point, along with whatever tutorials I can find online as well!