Enhancing quality of transfered VHS?

Philbill · 12-09-2004, 12:48 PM

Hi,
How do I enhance the quality of a VHS recording that has been transfered to a DVD-R? I assume there is software that can encode the film and "Clean it up"?
Help would be appreciated.
Phil

MartinImber · 12-09-2004, 3:13 PM

What are you actually transfering?

TV - look for DVDs of it
Copies - can you get to originals

Camera - well there are filters in some encoders but I have never tried them -anything I have captured has always looked OK

vonhosen · 12-09-2004, 4:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Philbill

Hi,
How do I enhance the quality of a VHS recording that has been transfered to a DVD-R? I assume there is software that can encode the film and "Clean it up"?
Help would be appreciated.
Phil

There are loads of free filters you can use with Virtualdub but to be honest for you to get the right filters & systems in order will take a hell of a lot of trial & error to start with. I suspect for most people all the effort is just not worth it.

Here is a discussion & instructions for use of some filters from the Vegas user froums

http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.co...lies=16&Page=2

MarkE19 · 12-09-2004, 6:50 PM

I think that the best way to improve the quality of capture from VHS to a PC is to:

replay the VHS tape on a VCR that has TBC (time base correction) - most of the newer JVC VCR's and a couple of the new Panasonics.
Replay on a SVHS VCR and use an S-Video lead to connect to the PC.
Use a good quality analogue capture device such as the Canopus AVC-100, but these are not cheap.

If the captured footage is of poor quality to start with then no matter how many filters etc you apply, you are still going to have poor quality video.

Mark.

Philbill · 12-09-2004, 7:35 PM

Hi guys,
Thx for the advice.
I have put the video onto the HDD of a Pan E85 using the Macromaster pro.
From there I have put it on a DVD-R. The quality is actually pretty good. However I wondered if there was a way to convert the data to MPEG or AVI and clean it up digitally.
The Pan finalises the disc as a DVD-V disc. In this format it is not recognised by Ulead Video studio.
regards
Phil

vonhosen · 12-09-2004, 7:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Philbill

Hi guys,
Thx for the advice.
I have put the video onto the HDD of a Pan E85 using the Macromaster pro.
From there I have put it on a DVD-R. The quality is actually pretty good. However I wondered if there was a way to convert the data to MPEG or AVI and clean it up digitally.
The Pan finalises the disc as a DVD-V disc. In this format it is not recognised by Ulead Video studio.
regards
Phil

If it is on a DVD-V already it is MPEG video. Doing further format conversions (i.e. to .avi & back again) is just going to make matters worse. Do you have the original VHS & can't that be captured to .avi on PC ?

But if you are saying the quality is actually pretty good already, I think you are likely to see little benefit from a lot of work in all honesty.

Philbill · 12-09-2004, 8:04 PM

The file format is not recognised as an MPEG file by Ulead Video Studio. However, windows media player and Power DVD play the DVD-R fine. I think its not worth any further effort as the quality is already better than I thought it would be.

vonhosen · 12-09-2004, 8:56 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Philbill

The file format is not recognised as an MPEG file by Ulead Video Studio. However, windows media player and Power DVD play the DVD-R fine. I think its not worth any further effort as the quality is already better than I thought it would be.

The files on a DVD-Video disc will be .VOB files which contain MPEG streams within them, & yes I think if you are happy with the quality best leave it as they are.