Hey! I'm copying my old VHS tapes to my harddrive. As you might know there usually are alot of noise and color bleed in old VHS tapes. Is there any way/software that can clean up the image? I belive that I've read somewhere that it is possible... One more thing. What resolution am I supposed to use when capturing video to the computer from a VHS-tape? Cheers!
On a PAL DVD, the resolution is 704x576, NTSC is less.. 720x480 (those are the standards anyway.. play about for best result.. most vhs tapes look fine at 640x480.
There are many such filters in TMPGenc & Pinacle; but the improvement is marginal at best and sometimes the "clean" video looks worse than the original. It is not a "one-click" process; you select various filters & how to use them. VHS is 320x240 (in theory), but you will probably get slightly better quality if you capture in 640x480 (SVHS resolution) (720x480 is DVD resolution; don't use that for capture unless your capture software does not offer 640x480 or you are using an SVHS deck.) Also, if you can capture to a lossless format, this would be best. (If you start with an MPEG or other lossy compression, you will have a drop in quality before you even use the filters.)
Capturing from tape in lossless raw format.. don't make me laugh.. it works out off vhs (with it's floating black levels and fine grained noise)... at between 3 and 8 gigs a minute... no matter how fast your capture software you will end up with just garbage as your machine can't keep up with the disk writes... eventually everything locks up.. at between 5 and 9 minutes. mpeg2 is a good lossy (not a lot) format for capture... it's good enough for dvd.. it's good enough for vhs.
Varnull - What kind of pre-historic sysem are you running? RAW 640x480 lossless capture is about 1GB/minute. If your system can't sustained writes of 17MBPS, then you have some serious problems to fix or some serious upgrades to perform. Also, MPEG2 is not a good lossy format; if it was, blu-ray would not be MPEG4!
