Capturing VHS - Sound Fluxuating

[Vance]

I am fairly new to all of this so I hope that this is he right place for answers (I hope) to my situation.

I am trying to capture and then convert a vhs tape to DVD. I am using a Win TV 2000XP Expert. My machine is AMD 2200+ with 256MB DDR. Right now I am trying to use the bundled Ulead VideoStudio 8 SE to capture.

When I do a test capture of about 5 minutes and then play it back, the sound is fluxuating up and down. It works its way from normal volume down to pretty low volume then works its way back up to normal as if I was literally turnign the volume up and down in an attempt to fade in and out (best way I can think of to describe what it's doing).

any ideas why it might be doing this and what I can do to correct/fix it?

Thanks,
Vance

[tdan]

First step is to determine if its a problem with the source or not. When you play the tape with the same VCR on your TV, is the sound OK or not?

Dan

[dphirschler]

Hard to tell from your description, but you might try adjusting the tracking manually. You may even have to capture the audio in a seperate pass.


Darryl

[NIRVANAX5X]

Is this not macrovision?

Or am I getting confused

You could try a simple normalize in audition,nero wave editor,soundforge.

[Cole]

My immediate thought was that this was an old tape. Some of my oldest VHS tapes (aroung 20 years old) wow on the sound track but seemingly not as bad as the levels you are describing.

[cyflyer]

macrovision it is not. Cole's theory is more likely. How old are the tapes and what do they playback like on VCR/TV ?

[Vance]

Now that you mention it, I am inclined to think it is the tape.

I went ahead and converted it over to DVD just for the experience (I used a +RW disk) and it does work. The sound is awful. Is there a realitively easy way to rip the audio and stablize the sound?

Thanks,
Vance

[dphirschler]

You could try shaping the volume. I am not sure if Audacity does that, but it might. You can in Goldwave, but it's quirky. I use Cool Edit.

You basically put points on a "rubber band" line and drag points higher or lower for volume along the wave.


Darryl

[Vance]

For what it's worth, I have been playing with and reading up on how to cure/correct this problem and I think I finally figured it out.

When I originally captured this VHS, I captured it in (I think) DVD format so I could take it right to disk without doing anything to it. Today I captured about 10 minutes of the VHS in .avi format and then converted it to MPEG2 and it seems that this may have taken care of the sound problem. While doing the play-back on my computer, the sound seems to be normal. Since I am pretty green at this, I was also quite suprised that the quality of the final MPEG file was much crisper and cleaner than the one I did straight to DVD format.

I am waiting on a new WD 250GB hard drive to come in (my 20GB just ain't cutting it no more). Once I get it in, installed and formated I plan to capture the entire VHS in .avi and see how the final file comes out. If capturing in .avi and converting does the trick, then I'll have learned that taking short-cuts with this video producing isn't worth it.

Just in case anyone is interested,
Vance

[lordsmurf]

Its probably just the software. Ulead stuff is not great for capturing.

[Vance]

Lordsmurf, I am inclined to agree with you even though I have very limited experience with this stuff. When I captured the test footage yesterday, I used IuVCR and the results were as different as day and night.

Anyway, I have visited your site several times and am leaning quite a bit from it. Perhaps I should look into some other capturing software other than Ulead.

I'm leaning and learning ,
Vance