Editing VHS capture, advice on how to improve video.

[ricardouk]

Hi everyone!

My dads friend asked me if i could transfer a VHS tape from 2000 to DVD. I captured a bit of it and tried to improve it (colors, saturation, dirt etc) but im unable to really see any difference, i followed some articles here and at doom9 on how to use avisynth but for this particular video i cant see any difference, tried virtualdub, avidemux also.

Am i capturing in a format that makes it more difficult to be edited? using virtualdub to capture, here's a mediainfo report of the captured file:

General
Complete name : 001.avi
Format : AVI
Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave
Format profile : OpenDML
File size : 31.8 GiB
Duration : 1h 7mn
Overall bit rate : 67.1 Mbps

Video
ID : 0
Format : Huffman
Codec ID : HFYU
Duration : 1h 7mn
Bit rate : 65.8 Mbps
Width : 720 pixels
Height : 576 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 5:4
Frame rate : 25.000 fps
Standard : PAL
Color space : RGB
Bit depth : 8 bits
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 6.346
Stream size : 31.1 GiB (98%)

Can anyone help me? here's 3 samples from that video:
500MB (1min) - https://www.dropbox.com/s/vyfsuk2zvicpn2p/test01.avi
86MB (10 sec) - https://www.dropbox.com/s/8z6547349nzy78u/test02.avi
72MB (8 sec) - https://www.dropbox.com/s/lzoig301zgfidmg/test03.avi

Thanks

[jman98]

You can get SOME improvement on your own with AviSynth, but in my opinion some of the members here do people no favors by adamantly insisting that POS home recorded videotapes can be turned into "DVD quality" with minimal effort. To be blunt, VHS tapes is really pretty crappy in general and you can only do so much to clean it up. If you have endless supplies of patience, time and money, you can keep buying "better" VCRs (but most of the recommended ones are now in poor shape and must be repaired at great cost with the repairs sometimes not lasting more than a few months) and do endless AviSynth processing to try to get what will likely be very minimal improvements. John Lennon said once about the Beatles "Let It Be" sessions that Phil Spector "... took the shi*ttiest load of badly recorded sh*t ever made and when he finished I didn't want to puke when I heard it" (or something pretty close to that) and honestly, in my opinion that may really be the best we can hope for without spending so much time on it that it becomes crazy. I got some help recently from jagabo on a tape and he come up with something in AivSynth I had never heard of before that was incredibly complicated to improve my video. It did really improve it, but just in John Lennon terms from profoundly problematic to merely problematic. Nobody would ever think that what I captured was "DVD quality". At this point in the game I think we just have to accept "best effort" from trying to do this kind of thing as the golden age of doing VHS tapes was YEARS ago. Whatever you do, please do not go down the path of insanity that one guy here did where for over a year he kept restarting his captures from the ground floor because nothing he did was good enough to please him nor were any of the many AviSynth suggestions he got. After a full year he had absolutely nothing to show for it because he rejected every attempt he made to capture and process his videos as "not good enough". Getting obsessed about somebody else's tape will do you no good. Honestly, most people just are not that fussy and will just be glad to get it with simple cleanup and color work done.

[ricardouk]

Hi jman98, thanks for the feedback, my goal is to try and improve and by improve i mean cleaning, i cant make omellets without eggs, if the quality is not there to start with.... i read a lot of vhs capture related threads here over these years about people wanting to get a VHS LP to dvd quality...i know its a mission impossible thing no doubts whatsoever about it...my goal is to clean it a bit, thats it...if it can be done good...if not oh well too bad...its life.

by this intro i hope the elders here realize what im trying to do, instead of thinking:" oh boy, another one thinking he can get pristine image from vhs"

Thanks