Garbage In, Garbage Out: An intro to restoring

lordsmurf · Posted: Nov 26, 2004 12:35

The blunt reality: Please do not come to this forum expecting miracles. You cannot take a downloaded video file or garbled VHS tape and make it a commercial-grade DVD with perfect audio and video quality. That's not going to happen. And you've also got to realize that not all errors can be fixed.

The only goal: Video and audio restoration has ONE GOAL: To make it better than the source. The goal is NOT to make it perfect quality. Just fix as much as you can and be happy with the results.

How to accomplish it: Hardware filters, software filters, time and experience. Those are the 4 key ingredients. Some errors can only be fixed in hardware, some only in software, some in both. It takes a lot of patience, a keen eye, and an understanding of the errors. Software work always requires lots of encoding time, regardless of the "speed" of the encoder. Even hardware can take a lot of setup time to tweak settings.

... and if all else fails, you do not have to do this on your own, there are services out there that you can pay to do the work for you (legal work, at least).
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digitalFAQ.com Guides for video capturing, restoring, authoring, burning. ATI AIW help.
NoMoreCoasters.com How to avoid burning bad discs. Blank media FAQ.

gshelley61 · Frequent Flyer Joined: 19 May 2004 Location: USA

Here's a link to the Association of Moving Image Archivists fact sheets on videotape preservation:

http://www.amianet.org/publication/resources/guidelines/videofacts/intro.html

Video Preservation Handbook:

http://www.amianet.org/publication/resources/guidelines/WheelerVideo.pdf

There's some good info at their site. They make a clear distinction between archiving videotape sources and restoration. Archiving involves transferring the original source to a suitable storage format without any alteration of the signal, while restoration is the process of creating viewable copies of the source that are "cleaned up", enhanced, color corrected, etc.