Uncompressed vs DV capture for noisy videos

[telefunken]

I wonder if the Canopus ADVC-300 DV25 capture is adequate for very noisy VHS tapes. Has anyone found that uncompressed capture is superior to DV capture for noisy sources? Target is DVD.

[danno78]

If you intend to process the image with filters (VirtualDub or AviSynth) then uncompressed or lossless codec like HuffYUV and Lagarith is the best choice. To do this you will need to use another capture card, Canopus ADVC-300 suport only DV compression.

[2Bdecided]

Many people say uncompressed must be better. In theory, this is true.

I don't have the equipment and patience to try it out - but I did try the opposite: I compared the results of DV capture with MPEG-2 capture. MPEG-2 should be clearly worse. I'm using various AVIsynth functions to clean up the footage.

Result: it depends on the level of noise. For good quality tapes, there were very few scenes where I could see a difference. For bad quality tapes, the MPEG-2 capture just broke up into macroblocks throughout.

With lots of noise, DV can get a bit soft and a bit blocky - but I'm not convinced that the final filtered result will be visibly less soft if you use lossless instead. The final MPEG-2 encoding (if you're burning to DVD) won't be perfect with any method.

Of course, you can tame some of the noise of very noisy tapes using the VCRs DNR, so DV will have little or no problem.


Like you, I'd love to see a lossless vs DV comparison to be sure.

Cheers,
David.