Annoying line at bottom of DV footage

[surefire]

I have captured some old wedding footage onto my PC via a DV camcoder (the VHS video was recorded onto DV tape first using a house hold video player and then downloaded onto my PC via firewire). The problem that I'm having is that there is an unsightly and distracting thickish line at the bottom of the play back window. It's difficult to describe but it looks a bit like a TV screen when the horizontal hold isn't working.

Does anyone know what it is, how to avoid it, or how to remove it from the captured footage.

P.S. I used WinDV to download the DV footage.

[holistic]

Tis normal analog head tape noise.
IF final output is for television then - IGNORE . TV overscan will 'hide it'.
IF final output is to be watched on a digital medium (laptop) then you may want to cut it.

Do a forum search, this question (problem) is common.

][

[Cornucopia]

NO!

Don't ignore it!

Transfers from such things as VHS tapes, SAT, Broadcast... already have plenty of Randomness/Noise/Snow as is, and this kind of thing wreaks havoc with an MPEG encoder!
Even worse, the Tape Head interchange noise that you're seeing is particularly difficult: It is an ever-changing, ever-moving, chunk of an odd number of lines that will never ADD anything to the signal. So the answer is to GET RID OF IT.

For example, in TMPGEnc, use [ Advanced | Clip Frame ] with a Bottom Mask.
You'll be saving yourself from wasting precious bits in the bitrate race.

HTH,
Scott

[FulciLives]

Just to confirm ...

Yes it is there on the original ... just can't see it on the TV due to overscan.

I would remove it though as your MPEG encoding will go much smoother.

I prefer to cut 12 lines of resolution off the bottom. That is usually enough to remove it. Then I cut 4 off of the top (just to get rid of any noise up there ... some capture cards get a line or two of noise on the top too).

Then I shfit the picture down by putting 8 lines of black on the top and bottom. This evens out the blank/black space and you are only really shifting the image down 4 pixels which is no big deal.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

P.S.
On really bad tapes you will find that you have to cut more than just 12 from the bottom ... sometimes 16 and with really bad tapes sometimes even more!

[holistic]

I agree with your point Cornucopia vis-à-vis the mpeg encoding and understand the waste it entails.
But if you don't want to loose any of the image (as i have done on some of my older tapes) i leave it.

[Cornucopia]

I understand what you're saying and want to keep as much of the footage as possible myself, but as far as I am concerned, once it's in the "skewed/headwrap/interchange" area, it's unrecoverable garbage and needs to be masked.

Scott