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Everett's Collection

Grateful Dead   09/19/1990

Madison Square Garden, New York, NY
Source Tripod JVC Single Tube Camera > /sbd audio
Media dvd   2 discs
Notes d2 = dual layer
J-Card Comment Grateful Dead
Madison Square Garden
New York, NY
9/19/90 Wednesday
NTSC 4:3 DVD-Video
Complete


SOURCES:

Video: Tripod JVC Single Tube Camera > 1 Deck > Panasonic AG-7400 > S-VHS Master >
Unknown Decks > VHS(x) > Samsung VR-325 > SVid > AVT8710 TBC > SVid > GeForce 6600GT >
3 captures @ 720x480 w/Virtual VCR > Huffyuv Lossless Codec 2.20 > avi avi avi

Remastering: 3 avis > AvsP > AviSynth (frame sync) > VirtualDubMod (averaging) > 1 avi >
AviSynth (MergeChroma,Leak,SeeSaw,DeGrainMedian,LimitedSharpenFaster,Letterbox,Weave) >
VDubMod (for 62 hours) > Huffyuv avi > CCE Encoder > MPEG2 > DVDLab Pro > DVD5 + DVD9

Audio: SBD (Wiley) > shntool join > wav > Adobe Audition > wav (32/48) >
Adobe Premier Pro 2 (rate adjust for sync) > 16/48 > DVDLab Pro > DVD

Video Patch: DebugMode Wax 2.0 + PeteKaleidescope > 1 min keyframes w/ random settings > avi


DETAILS:
Set 1: DVD5 (7200kbps CBR) 1:07:59 h:m:s
Set 2: DVD9 (8000kbps CBR) 1:48:10 h:m:s
NTSC 4:3 29.97fps 720x480 Anamorphic Interlaced
Upgraded Audio to SBD (Wiley), 2ch Stereo LPCM 16/48
Menus, chapters, setlist.
Videos are first play.
Hornsby. Rosebud. Epic.
Project 1. 11.5 GiB.


SETLIST:

Set I Disc 1
[1] (00:00) Jack Straw
[2] (07:31) Bertha
[3] (15:35) Me & My Uncle >
[4] (19:19) Big River
[5] (25:39) It Must've Been The Roses
[6] (31:59) Stuck Inside Immobile With The Memphis Blues Again
[7] (42:04) Help On The Way >
[8] (47:28) Slipknot! >
[9] (54:01) Franklin's Tower


Set II Disc 2
[1] (0:00:00) Playing In The Band >
[2] (0:10:49) Ship Of Fools >
[3] (0:17:25) Playing In The Band >
[4] (0:19:47) Uncle John's Band >
[5] (0:30:36) Let It Grow >
[6] (0:42:25) Jam >
[7] (0:52:24) Drums >
[8] (1:00:37) Space >
[9] (1:15:09) Going Down The Road Feeling Bad >
10] (1:22:50) Stella Blue >
11] (1:33:26) Around & Around
12] (1:43:01) E: The Mighty Quinn


NOTES:
From deep within a gray crate, amongst 100 videos they emerge, some by inspiration,
some by determination, all with respect to my friend, Jerry Garcia, and the greatest
band the world has ever known. Elements across time and space are coincident here
at The Station, where we occasionally drop to our knees and give thanks simply for
the infinity that exists beneath us, where we like to say leech if you must, seed if
you can. No problem, I think we can make it shine. So in asking Jer for help on
where to start, serendipity led straight to this show. And now you've found it too.
Maybe you were hoping to get a nice concert DVD, maybe you were just surfing around
the net, or even got turned onto this by some friends. Whatever the seemingly
insignificant circumstances, you should know it's so much bigger than that. Your
entire life prepared you for this moment in time, and this author, who has seen
miracles, is telling it to you straight like that. With a spark in their eyes,
the boys were on this night, and it's time to return there, to Madison Square Garden.
There are plenty of treasures to look for in this concert. By the middle of the first
song, Jack Straw, when Jerry nails his solo, the whole crowd is erupting. Thanks to
the fantastic job Wiley did with the audio, you'll be cranking it right into Bertha
and beyond. Especially cool is the way the Garcia closeups include Vince's right
hand working that synth of his. And when the fat man cracks a smile, it hits you right
in your ticker. And talking about keyboards, Bruce is amazing, tearing up his solos
and bopping his leg next to the piano.

Shot from the left side of the venue above the floor, the camera work here is so well
done, zooming and panning to each artist, as if they'd done this a thousand times. The
Me & My Uncle > Big River is exciting, and Bruce is a big part of that. When he's
taking a solo and finds just the right groove, he gets this huge grin, and his eyes get
all big. You can certainly feel just what he was feeling as waves of joy spill over you.
They start into It Must've Been The Roses a bit fast, and Garcia gives a few plucks of his
lowest bass string, with that forte ba dooo ba dooo of his, telling the band to listen
up for the adjustment. His guitar sounds so beautiful on this show, and so does Phil's
bass. Bobby is a bit low in the mix, but not the whole show. He gets plenty of good
licks in, too. He strikes the perfect balance of lead vocals this night with a certain
maturity and holds back on going wild but not on the feeling. During Stuck Inside
Immobile With The Memphis Blues Again, Phil is amazing because his bass is captured
nearly perfectly in this mix, letting you hear all the nuances of his finger work, the
different ways he plucks each string. It sounds really sweet through headphones.
The end of Set 1, Help > Slip > Franklin's, was missing from the video, and with it
being about 20 min., it was a pretty easy to fill that time with a Kaleidescope. No
effort was made to sync it to what we can hear, though, just inspiration was used to
pick the settings, which change a minute apart. Some cool things happen, shapes and
whatnot that seem to be timed just right, like at the end of Franklin's.

Set 2 starts off with some great solo work by Phil captured with a midshot by the
videographer. They jam after the first chorus into Ship Of Fools, and I must say, Vince
hits his intro to perfection. Garcia's voice is wonderful as he so often was, full of
emotion with his body swaying and his eyebrows going. They work their way into Playing
and Uncle John's Band, which should give any Head goosebumps. It'd be hard not to rank
the Stella Blue that follows right up there. Though there's not a lot of shots of the
drummers, there are a couple of moments that really blew me away, like Mickey playing
the high hat with his elbow during Let It Grow. And watch for the Jam between Garcia,
Weir, and Hornsby. Very cool.


On remastering: This was the first project undertaken, and it lasted about
9 months going through the learning phase. The assumption is that there is a
very small window in which we can archive these VHS tapes. Each playing degrades
them slightly, each day the sit is another day they could mold. Whether fallacious,
the assumption is also that these efforts are needed and must proceed from the sources
at hand as if they are the last copies on Earth. The goal would be to preserve the
video in lossless format or to improve it slightly if possible without distortion.
Modest goals that require dedication, because the analog capture process induces noise
through the cables and other equipment. That means that a VHS tape which has noise
already recorded onto the tape (by other transfers) gets even more noise during the
capture. This combination of induced and inherited noise are the two main enemies of
a good video. Red color shifting downward on VHS tape clones is also a problem. All
of these are somewhat correctable.

The steps:
A top end VHS or S-VHS deck outputs through S-Video cables and a Time Base Corrector,
stripping off the garbled sync signal and recreates it, sending it along to a NVidia
6600GT VIVO card.
Using WDM drivers and Virtual VCR, the tape is captured at 720x480 resolution,
higher than a regular 4:3 image, which would be 640x480. The reason for the higher
resolution, which yields a distorted anamorphic image, is that picture quality is better.
Resizing is done automatically by your DVD player. The video is saved to the hard drive
uncompressed using a lossless codec called Huffyuv. The reason the VHS is not captured
directly to MPEG2 is that the MPEG codecs are lossy and are only good for the final DVD,
not for any post processing. Each VHS tape was captured 3 times. The three digitized
copies of the show were between 20GB and 45GB each depending on the length of the Set.
Noise induced by the capture process will appear as random speckles that don't match
from one capture to the next. They are unique. By averaging the three captures,
induced noise speckles are minimized. To average the three captures, they must match
every single frame, but they don't because a VCR and TBC and VIVO card all run at
slightly at different clock speeds. The result is that every 15min or so, a frame
will be missing from a capture, or it will be duplicated, or two frames will be
blended into one.
In order to synch a few hundred thousand frames and check that they all match, a couple
of neat tricks are used. If you subtract one capture's frame from another capture's frame,
the difference would be zero (all black) if the two capture were identical, but because
they are not identical but have random speckles, the subtraction of the two frames yields
a faint outline of the shapes in the video. When suddenly a frame goes missing from one
capture, the fact that the whole rest of the video is now shifted off by one makes the
subtraction instantly noticeable.
Once the three captures are matched up by using a series of DeleteFrame(####) commands and
such, they are ready to be averaged into one avi, thus eliminating the induced noise. That's
done in AviSynth & VDubMod, taking about seven hours. Averaging five clips is better than
three, but the returns greatly diminish beyond five. Usually a 45GB file will shrink down
to 40GB or so because the decreased noise simplifies the image.
Then comes the hard part, determining a series of commands for AviSynth that will eliminate
the inherited noise as much as possible without removing the detail of the video, adjusting
the color bleed and black/white levels, and sharpening the video if possible to bring out the
original video from the generations of clones that turned Jerry's strings into fuzz. Some
amazing processing gets done. Basically every single pixel of every frame gets compared to
the eight pixels surrounding it in space, then it gets compared to the same pixel in the
previous two frames and the same pixel in the next two frames, along with the eight pixels
surrounding each of those. Then motion vectors are estimated for each pixel in both space and
the time, creating a map of how the pixels are moving. The map is then used as hints to the
subsequent spatio-temporal denoisers. A radically denoised version is compared to a radically
sharpened version in a function called SeeSaw that teeters the edge between choosing the sharp
aspects vs the denoised aspects of the frame, using the best of each and tossing out the garbage.
That is then fed into a second sharpening function called LimitedSharpenFaster which was able to
bring out the strings in Jerry's Guitar that were blurred in the tape.

3 captures > averaged into 1 > chroma shift > deinterlace > motion
estimation > denoise > sharpen > weave > letterbox > encode to MPEG2 >
sync audio > author to DVD

The processing takes about 62 hours to do a show, sometimes more. Syncing the audio takes about
a week to a month, I suppose, depending on the continuity of the assets, drop outs, and patches.
You've probably read how that's done, lining up the vhs audio and the sbd upgrade so that the
beginning of a song matches, then chopping the sbd at the end of the song and adjusting its play
rate so that the end now matches the end on the vhs exactly. With the beginning and the end of
the sbd now matching the vhs audio, marks are placed at ~1min intervals, noting the time difference
between identical passages in the two audios. As the song progresses the discrepancy in timing
gets worse then returns eventually to zero offset at the end the song because we pinned it that way.
The song is then split as necessary and the pieces rate adjusted so that the whole song is Dead on.
It's very difficult to get the sync right at the beginning of a show, when tape speeds and
dropouts and starting points and crossfades between patch sources make it sketch, but we tried
to do our best. There are a couple of menus on the DVDs that include the selist and some
photos. These discs were created to play the videos first and go to the menu at the end or
when you press the Menu button on your remote. This was done mostly because the author's
skill at graphical art seemed to be tertiary to the sights and sounds herin. Please enjoy.
- nibbles@speakeasy.net


FLAWS:
There's a 60Hz buzz for the first 10s of the video during the pluge pattern,
which should have been removed, but was missed due to inexperience. There's
a few seconds of garbled video during The Might Quinn encore.


CREDITS:
To Bill at Morgan Stanley for the VHS and to all the Heads at bt.etree.org who
make so many great things happen. Special thanks to the camera operator and those
who shared and cloned the masters.


MD5:
e64137b862ae8f2cf7f5c645cabbbcd7 *DVDa\VIDEO_TS\VIDEO_TS.BUP
e64137b862ae8f2cf7f5c645cabbbcd7 *DVDa\VIDEO_TS\VIDEO_TS.IFO
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a7829c358ddb4fa95d6678a2bf8c2849 *DVDb\VIDEO_TS\VTS_01_8.VOB
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Owned by Everett · Last Updated May 23, 2023