on 28-08-2005 2:56, Dick Applebaum at email@hidden wrote:
I have some irreplaceable 8mm tapes taken with a RCA Pro 8 VideoCam
(circa 1995).
I can view the tapes through the video cam and TV via 2 RCA
connectors,
I also have a Sony DCR-HC20 (without Playthrough).
I want to convert the 8mm tapes to digital, preferably iMovie (but
will get FinalCut if necessary)
I have 2 LaCie 1TB drives & a DualLevel DVD burner on my iMac G5
2Ghz.
I have 3 grandkids , 5, 6 and 9 years old.
I am looking for the best long term (2-3 years) solution.
I can buy a Canopus converter (or somesuch), or buy a newer VideoCam.
All in all, there are less than 10 8mm tapes & once they are
captured to DVD, this format will be abandoned
Hopefully someone has some experience in this & can save me some
false starts & $.
TIA
Dick
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Hello Dick
I'm sorry if I seem to complicated; it's just to say I don't believe
possible to have good results starting with 8mm tapes and passes
them thru
iMovie; I don't think FinalCut has the right tools either but I
might be
wrong...
In 8mm tapes the bandwidth is narrow and shared by the luma and chroma
signals which sometimes even crosses their own room. Spacial
resolution is
also low.
Provided your digital camcorder has analog input you don't need any
pass
thru: simply record the cassette first and then playback it by the
firewire
connection to tranfer datas onto the Hard Disk.
Speaking about the tools everithing becomes more complicated
becouse to get
some decent DVDs out of an 8mm composite tape there are two
opposite ways
(none of which relates to consumer or prosumer NLEs).
Pay attention about DV converter: these tiny boxes compresses much
the video
and when it's time to brighten dark scenes, or apply some kind of
autolevels
function, show up DCT matrices (think about a grid of 8*8 pixels)
About the software you have to roads:
A) You go for very expensive applications starting from After
Effects and
behind - with $2.000 plugins ala Film Fix (Mac version is upcoming) or
Algosuite (still waiting a demo licence to tryout by the company...)
B) or you go offroad, searching all the necessary tools into the
opensource
world, which messed and unconfortable:-)
As far as I know OpenSource here mens Avisynth/Virtualdub flow and
this, in
turn, Windows (argh...I said it). The former is a powerfull script
based
frameserver whose text file is seen as a video one by NLEs,
compression
suites and so on (in case it's not it needs to be warped in an .avi
container) but also with an unworth lerning curve if you only have to
postprocess 10 reels, the latter is a more viable solution.
If you can reach a Windows box, the 1st choice should be this one:
1) download and install Avisinth 2.5x
http://sourceforge.net/projects/avisynth2
2) copy to the plugins directory the following libraries:
2.1) TomsMoComp for deinterlacing Pal sources or Kernel Deint for
NTSCs, in
case you'd like to de-interlace and burn a progressive DVD.
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/trbarry/
2.2) De Pan which is a Global motion estimation serving for
stabilization,
retiming et c
http://bag.hotmail.ru/
2.3) RemoveDirt, my favorite (though a pane to master) grain-dirt
remover
http://www.removedirt.de.tf/
2.4) DCT filters that zero the highest frequency's order found
after the DCT
while reducing to .05 the 2nd highest.
http://bag.hotmail.ru/
3) Make a new .txt file, copy and past the following script and
than change
the extension to .avs (obviously the name of your file plus the
path to it
have to be changed as well and crop/add borders too)
######################################################################
######
#######################
#path to the file + name
AVISource("F:\xxx")
#define the crop area to cut out garbage along the borders
Crop(0,0,-0,-0)
#autolevels function - of you don't like default values have to
look to the
readme file
colorYUV(autogain=true,autowhite=true)
#estimate a global motion compensation with a threshold to detect
scene
change, thus no need to #cutting movies into many different chunks.
write
two stabilized clips mede of previous and next #stabilized clips
for each
original frame analyzed and interleave them making a 3 times longer
movie
#with 3 frames per 1 orgiginal frame.
i=converttoYV12()
mdata=DePanEstimate(i)
DePanInterleave(i,data=mdata)
#first pass of RemoveDirt which risult in smoothing also camera
panning and
general motion, #otherwise not possible since RemoveDirt is a temporal
cleaner
Removedirt(mthreshold=360,pthreshold=60,grey=false)
# select 1 motion stabilized frame every group of three as seem above
selectevery(3,1)
#2nd pass of RemoveDirt with the same parameters value as the first
one
Removedirt(mthreshold=360,pthreshold=60,grey=false)
# Post discrete cosine transormation to cut the hieght frequency
and halves
the 2nd hightest
DctFilter(1,1,1,1,1,1,.5,0)
Addborders(0,0,0,0)
Fadeout(25)
######################################################################
######
#####################
Add MSU SmartSharpener in Virtualdub -- small overall and borders
http://www.compression-links.info/
An easier way is to Virtual dub only.
In this case an italian called "Emiliano Ferrari" has ported on the VD
plattform a great spacial denoiser based on wavelet (the one I
prefer among
spacial filters) VagueDenoiser:
http://bag.hotmail.ru/vague/vaguedenoiser.dhtml
In in Virtualdub you have almost all the power of Avisyth
accessible by a
Graphical User Interface and this is true also for Vaguedenoiser.
Set a High
threshold if you source is noisy like normally are vhs/8mm tapes
and set it
as adaptive. Remember to abilitate wiener 2 pass algorithm.
Hope not to be banned from the list...
I'm NOT a Win Evangelist at all but serious task ca't be
accomplished by
iMovie.
Gianni
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