Old videos Dazzle DVIISVCD

[CS35]

I have hundreds of old beta and VHS video tapes from the late 80s and early 90s that I want to convert to VCD/SVCD/DVD. The problem I am having is:
so far, all results to VCD and SVCD have had excessive pixilating (blockiness.)
I'm wondering if this may have something to do with the amount of video noise that these tapes contain (cable was not a state of the art medium back then!)I looks fine when played on my TV (the original tape, I mean) but you tend to compensate for video noise when watching at tape anyway...
Any suggestions on how to get a decent copy, in any format up to and including DVD (I have the Panasonic DVD-RAM/R burner) would be appreciated!!!
Thanks!
Carl

[norm]

If you know someone with a different brand of capture card try one of your tapes on their card. That will at least prove that it's not the DVC2 that is being a bit sensitive.
Any visible noise you can see on the playback will confuse the mpeg encoder as it is not sure what is noise and what is picture information and can't compensate for this.
Some video capture cards are better than others when it comes to noise.
Do you get a better results from your beta tapes than the VHS ????

[anti-alias]

The DVC2 doesn't do that great a job at low bitrates. Try capturing at DVD settings (8-10 Mbs). If that still looks bad, you are probably out of luck. If it looks ok you can try burning a DVD (Can't help with that, however).

Also, you can use TMPGenc to transcode to SVCD. If you use a lot of tweaks, filters and high quality settings, you can generate an SVCD that looks a lot better than a realtime captured SVCD using the DVC2. The problem is it will take a long time to render.

Here is a (long) description of that process I wrote up a while back ....

http://home.carolina.rr.com/readhome/DVC2/SVCD.html

[EricB]

Get a Sony DV camcorder, use passthrough to convert to DV, then TMPGenc to produce VCD compliant file.

[jouret4]

I've just bought a DVC2 for my hundreds of old VHS tapes and encountered the same issue. In my case, switching from the S-VHS input to the standard video input was a miracle cure. I'm a newbie at this myself and so haven't worked out if it's a cable issue, one of the bits of hardware, or configuration thing, but you gotta go with what works. Got a realtime SVCD capture after the cable change that was up to the standard of the source.

[SHS]

Just a hint but a signal booster may help win work with with old tape.