restoring an old VHS

[antoniomch]

Hi

Is there an easy noob way to enhance an old VHS movie that I already converted to mpg ?

[jagabo]

Maybe. What's wrong with it?

[lordsmurf]

Describe the problems.

[antoniomch]

Some parts of the film are very white, but all the film is very "blurry"
I've attached a sample

On the left shows what happened in some sections of the video
The other image shows how the rest of the movie is, too blurry. There are some sections worst then on this image.

I can digitallize the video again, since I have the tape, and I still own a functional VHS
Probably there is something I can do to make a better mpg file, before I enhance it.


Note:
I'm not a noob in the computer world, but I'am a noob, very noob, in video editing/processing...

capturar.png

[guns1inger]

If that is what the tape looks like then you will have problems getting much out of them. The whites look very hot, so there is little to no detail left in them to restore.

[dphirschler]

Looks like you will be capturing again. You need to spend some time tweaking your capture settings. Bring contrast down and set gamma at 1 (or 100% which ever your software calls it). If there is a setting for "gain" then you will want to bring it down as well.


Darryl

[lordsmurf]

Sometimes consumer VCRs overly add contrast, and then some capture devices will do this to video it thinks have "copy protection" (even if it's homemade, obviously).

[jagabo]

To get really great captures you'll need a good S-VHS deck with line time base correcter, noise filtering and sharpening; a full frame time base corrector; and a video processing amplifier to adjust levels and colors. All that will cost you about US$1000. Then you'll probably have to capture shot by shot with adjustments taylored for each shot.

If you are unwilling to purchase all that equipment you can at least adjust the levels (brightness, contrast) at your capture device. That will hopefully get you some details in the washed out bright areas and better contrast. If you can, capture uncompressed or losslessly compresssed (huffyuv, lagarith). That will allow you to run sharpening and other filters without accentuating the MPEG artifacts. But there's a limit to how much you'll be able to sharpen without making the video look worse.