Neat Video & Neat Image community

Looking to apply NV to various VHS captures to DV avi, eventually to convert to pillarboxed DVD and/or pillarboxed 720p Blu-Ray.

I'll be deinterlacing/cropping with the avisynth script QTGMC.

Will there be any difference between applying NV to the raw interlaced captured footage or applying NV after it's been deinterlaced? Before or after other correction?

I.e. where in the process do you recommend applying NV for best results?

Thanks

I recommend to apply noise reduction first and only then crop and deinterlace.

If you want to be sure I recommend to directly try different ways and compare the visual quality of the results.

Vlad

RobertP wrote:Looking to apply NV to various VHS captures to DV avi, eventually to convert to pillarboxed DVD and/or pillarboxed 720p Blu-Ray.

I've done this many times restoring archival footage that only exists on a VHS aircheck and I second the advice that you should noisereduce first before performing any other processing. NeatVideo, combined with your video editor (I use PPro CS5) properly reduces noise across interlaced footage. If you deinterlace the footage beforehand, you are giving a worse quality master for NeatVideo to work with and the results are suboptimal. Conversely, giving deinterlacing algorithms a cleaner interlaced copy makes the algorithms work better.

BTW I would not do DV -> pillarboxed DVD -- you'll lose horizontal resolution that way. Just DV -> 4:3 DVD works best. (For 720p, yes, you will be pillarboxing.)

Trixter wrote: BTW I would not do DV -> pillarboxed DVD -- you'll lose horizontal resolution that way.

Thanks for the input. Why do you feel pillarboxing - i.e. making the black boxes on the sides part of the image - reduces horizontal resolution if the 4:3 portion of the image remains the same size?

RobertP wrote:

Trixter wrote: BTW I would not do DV -> pillarboxed DVD -- you'll lose horizontal resolution that way.

Thanks for the input. Why do you feel pillarboxing - i.e. making the black boxes on the sides part of the image - reduces horizontal resolution if the 4:3 portion of the image remains the same size?

Because DVD is limited to 720x480 whether the source material is standard def (4:3) or anamorphic (16:9). If you make an anamorphic 16:9 DVD with 4:3 content centered in the middle of the frame, it will be reduced in size horizontally (which creates the pillarboxing).

If you are mixing 4:3 and 16:9 content in a single video/project, then you have no choice but to go with 16:9. But if your content is only 4:3 and your output target is DVD, you should leave it 4:3 so that nothing is resized. Your HD television already pillarboxes 4:3 content so there's no need to mangle the source footage in the pre-production phase.