Software Solutions

[robjv1]

I feel like I have a pretty strong knowledge of the hardware needed to restore a VHS tape, but I feel sort of in the dark as far as the potential software you can use if you might need to beyond what your hardware solutions can accomplish.

So you've got your JVC S-VHS VCR with line TBC, DNR and the filters, and you've got your standalone TBC, and maybe you even have a color corrector of sorts, and a nice JVC (or Toshiba, or Pioneer) DVD recorder and all seems just fine and you are generally pleased with the results, but you want to tinker just a bit more with the image (at the expense of re-encoding your video of course) and you have no hardware left to do it with -- just in the most general of senses, what software do you most often use to tweak your video further?

I would guess (maybe incorrrectly) that it would be better to capture this stuff via AVI directly to your computer if you can pull it off without problems and apply the filters and fixes and such instead of re-encoding your MPEG-2 stream, but for those that already use a standalone DVD recorder for their video, what programs do you use most often and what tasks do you specifically use them for? Also I know with MPEG video wizard you can drop the DVD format files right into the program and edit them there which is nice, but I don't know of any other excellent programs that let you do the same.

[edDV]

I feel like I have a pretty strong knowledge of the hardware needed to restore a VHS tape, but I feel sort of in the dark as far as the potential software you can use if you might need to beyond what your hardware solutions can accomplish.

So you've got your JVC S-VHS VCR with line TBC, DNR and the filters, and you've got your standalone TBC, and maybe you even have a color corrector of sorts, and a nice JVC (or Toshiba, or Pioneer) DVD recorder and all seems just fine and you are generally pleased with the results, but you want to tinker just a bit more with the image (at the expense of re-encoding your video of course) and you have no hardware left to do it with -- just in the most general of senses, what software do you most often use to tweak your video further?

I would guess (maybe incorrrectly) that it would be better to capture this stuff via AVI directly to your computer if you can pull it off without problems and apply the filters and fixes and such instead of re-encoding your MPEG-2 stream, but for those that already use a standalone DVD recorder for their video, what programs do you use most often and what tasks do you specifically use them for? Also I know with MPEG video wizard you can drop the DVD format files right into the program and edit them there which is nice, but I don't know of any other excellent programs that let you do the same.

Pre-Processing steps like good vcr, proc-amp levels correction, TBC/DNR (both require A/D and then D/A in most available equipment) are common to all capture processes. All have potential to improve the capture.

So you are saying you want to encode to MPeg2 (or MPeg4 or DV) during capture but want to do more later? You would do this only if you are bandwidth limited during capture or limited in funds. That requires a decode back to RGB or YUV to process pixels. DV can handle multiple decode-encode cycles*, Mpeg2 less and MPeg4 lesser or non (parden my French).

So is it better to capture uncompressed after all the pre-processing? Yes if you can afford it or if you intend to filter or do effects later. 10bit capture allows more processing headroom than 8 bits. 10bit uncompressed SDI is the standard of the broadcast industry for this reason. They don't know what needs to be done in advance so trade money.

The big difference between us folk and those guys is they also can afford realtime filters and encoders that would process very s_l_o_w_l_y if software only. They can't afford non-realtime. The issue here is can we afford the hours of processing for minutes of result?


* 4:1:1 (DV-NTSC) handles more generations than 4:2:0 (DV-PAL or HDV). This is because 4:2:0 requires a reinterpolation of chroma on each pass.