Berlin - (1984) Now It's My Turn (IVTC; QTGMC deinterlace; PA-85-122 NTSC Laserdisc)

Berlin - (1984) Now It's My Turn (IVTC; QTGMC deinterlace; PA-85-122 NTSC Laserdisc)




Berlin's 1984 Love Life was the first album I purchased and this song and video has a special place in my heart.

This was made after I was disappointed with the quality of the version on Youtube. I tried to find it on DVD or U-Matic videotape but had no luck. I found it came out on Laserdisc, a format which I hadn't used before. I bought a used Pioneer Laserdisc player and the Pioneer PA-85-122 Laserdisc. I used my Hauppauge Win-TV HVR-1150 HDTV card which also has composite and S-Video inputs. I tried Virtualdub2 for capturing, but it wouldn't see my capture card. I ended up using the first version Virtualdub (from 1998 I believe) which worked fine with no dropped frames capturing to uncompressed RGB avi file.

This is where the fun began... While the Laserdisc looks great on a CRT TV, I found out that Laserdisc has no error correction, and as a consequence, looks like crap when captured to digital. I cleaned the disc before playing, but didn't notice at first the huge scratch halfway through video #5, Now It's My Turn. It caused distortion moving from the top of the frame to the bottom over about two minutes. I realized that the way CLV Laserdisc format is designed, this is what you'd see with a big radial scratch, affecting nearly the same vertical place and moving downwards in each frame for a period of time.

Before the scratch, I could easily see defects throughout the video. Black spots, white spots, various degrees of distortion on about half of the frames. Even VHS isn't this bad. If it had been on U-Matic, I'd have been done in minutes (no defects at all).

I bought another disc and this one was in much better shape- no scratches at all. I captured it and it still had many defects, just in different frames, and different places in the same frame. I never knew how important error detection and correction was in optical media until now.

I did try a second capture of the second disc and combined three captures with the AVISynth plugin  twooutofthree.dll to see it that would help. Unfortunately, the idea of the plugin is sound, but its implementation poor, and the output video was just as bad, so it was useless.

I realized that if I exported each capture to numbered .tiff files (about 7800 files for each capture post deinterlacing), both captures exactly synced framewise, that with lots of time, 2 Windows Explorers, 2 Irfanviews, Photoshop, lots of ctrl-c and ctrl-v, I could make a good video with no obvious defects. Two weeks later, 14 hours per day, I present one good video. The rest on this Laserdisc will be done at some time in the future.

QTGMC (for AVISynth) is widely considered the best deinterlacer and denoiser provided you know how to use it. Fortunately I'm well past the learning curve with it and get excellent results using it.

While fixing the bad frames, I recognized that this was likely shot on film at 23.976FPS, and used Virtualdub2's IVTC filter to remove the dups and change the framerate from 29.97 to 23.976. This eliminated the judder I was seeing.

I made two versions, one using H264 and one MPEG2. I am releasing the MPEG2 version as that has the best compatibility with players (quality looks the same with both as I gave the MPEG2 version 50% more bits).

Source: NTSC composite video on PA-85-122 Laserdisc
Size: 298MB
Total bitrate: 9557Kbps
Video: MPEG2 720x480p 23.976FPS 7830Kbps VBR
Audio: PCM 16bits 48.0KHz 2 channels 1536Kbps CBR
Runtime: 04:21

Mediainfo:
General
Complete name : Berlin - (1984) Now It's My Turn (IVTC; QTGMC deinterlace; PA-85-122 NTSC Laserdisc).mpg
Format : MPEG-PS
File size : 298 MiB
Duration : 4mn 21s
Overall bit rate mode : Variable
Overall bit rate : 9 557 Kbps
Writing library : encoded by TMPGEnc (ver. 2.57.41.146)

Video
ID : 224 (0xE0)
Format : MPEG Video
Format version : Version 2
Format profile : [email protected]
Format settings, BVOP : Yes
Format settings, Matrix : Custom
Format settings, GOP : M=3, N=18
Duration : 4mn 21s
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : 7 831 Kbps
Maximum bit rate : 12.0 Mbps
Width : 720 pixels
Height : 480 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 4:3
Frame rate : 23.976 fps
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Progressive
Compression mode : Lossy
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.945
Time code of first frame : 00:00:00:00
Time code source : Group of pictures header
Stream size : 244 MiB (82%)
Writing library : TMPGEnc 2.57.41.146
Color primaries : BT.601 PAL
Transfer characteristics : BT.470 System B, BT.470 System G
Matrix coefficients : FCC 73.682

Audio
ID : 189 (0xBD)-160 (0xA0)
Format : PCM
Format settings, Endianness : Big
Format settings, Sign : Signed
Muxing mode : DVD-Video
Duration : 4mn 21s
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 1 536 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz
Bit depth : 16 bits
Stream size : 47.8 MiB (16%)