Encoding black and white - Ways to improve? Filters?

[moorthy]

I have some grainy footage on VHS that I'm going to encode (MPEG2).

It's an old football game from 1967, that was transferred over from the original film.

Overall, I'd have to say that the quality of the original is good, but as always, it could be better.

Any tips out there from improving the quality? TMPGenc filters?

[BJ_M]

noise reduction first off , then in color adjustment , pull out all colors ..

[SaSi]

The Tmpgenc filters are slow. I would work with VirtualDUB to do filtering. There are several plug-in filters for the program and you can find the appropriate links in the tool section. Also do a google search for "virtualdub plugins" or "virtualdub plug-in", will reveal several more.

As BJ_M suggested, do softening. I would remove colors at the end. I'm not sure if I'm correct - so BJ_M if you are listening, please comment:

I suggest to decolorize at the end because even if color is not good quality, the RGB space conveys some luminance information (gammut?) that would be lost if you totally de-saturate making the 24bit information into 8 bit.

I would therefore do softening, smoothering, perhaps even temporal softening first and then decolorize, in the same way one scans an image at high resolution, work filters and retouches it and then reduces resolution to the wanted size.