I’m making some progress on the next phase of my Metamorphoses project – stacking multiple luminance captures to reduce the video noise.
For context, each of the captures goes from being clear to garbage for roughly 3 seconds at a time, due to my forcing the VCR to play back the SECAM-formatted tape as PAL. It can’t decode the color, but it tries, which apparently mangles the signal. It doesn’t do so consistently, though, so I ended up capturing the film – in whole or in parts – over a dozen times to make sure I had the full thing.
Besides replacing the garbage areas, combining multiple captures can help to improve the image quality
…the downside is I have to go through the film frame by frame to do so. At the top of each video I’ve added a number, which identifies when that video ISN’T visible. When I scrub through the film, I watch those numbers (and the brightness) for changes, then pick the swatch on the side that matches the number of visible layers. If there are 4 visible layers, the 4 swatch will divide the image by a super-white RGB value of 4, 4, 4 (normal white is 1, 1, 1)
It’s… at least as tedious a process as it sounds.
As if all of this Metamorphoses nonsense isn’t enough of a distraction, and I may now have another – I’ve successfully modded my friend’s VCR to work with my Doomsday Duplicator. It won’t work with my Metamorphoses tape, as this VCR is NTSC-only, BUT I will be able to get an RF capture of the American version, Winds of Change!
This VCR was bound for the garbage bin, but now it’s worth keeping for a bit longer!