Newbee needs help with problems resulting from handy cam tapes to DVD

[pbinder]

I have absolutely no knowledge about restoration of Video !

But I do have a number of small cassets that I have filmed years ago that I now need to move to DVD or any other format so that I can burn them on DVD's and save them from further decay,
now here are the problems that I have seen so far,

some tapes are black and white but should be in color
some are black and white at parts of the time that I record the tape on to my PC
some have very dark areas --- 5-10 sec. of film with not enough light
some have heavy camera noice
some flitter ( that means that the movie pictures are moving up and down )
some are very un-sharp

so I guess I need a simple to use software program that could help me to fix them,and maybe a book tip such as " Video Restauration for absolute Dummies !



P.Binder

[redwudz]

You would have to tell us what format they are presently in? Is it DV, Hi8 or other? How did you transfer them to your computer? What card, what program?

What program you use would use to clean up the video would depend on what format you transferred them to the computer. I would recommend AVI format, Huffuv or PicVideo are two. Then you can use a program like VirtualDub, or my preference, VD Mod. There are a lot of filters available for VD. Look here for them: http://neuron2.net/

I would recommend cutting out a representative 5 minute clip and using that to experiment on. Remember less is better when filtering. When you get the right combination for some improvement, go ahead and filter the whole video.

And welcome to our forums.

[pbinder]

the small tapes have been filmed about 6-7 years ago on a Panasonic VHS-C camera using these
bulky little tapes that need a larger adapter cassette to fit into a video recorder ,they are USA system that is different from the one we use here in New Zealand ( we use Pal I believe ) so I just bought a VCR that can play both formats,it is a DSE ,6 head NICAMIA Hi-Fi Stereo VCR and I have connected this VCR to my new desk top computer via a TV multi media card ,now the computer has a 260 GB hard drive and 1 GB memory plus a very good and fast video card,a Geforce 7600GT card ,so far I have been able to load the content of the tapes onto my video file but the quality is bad,also the tapes seem to loos even more quality from the simple tape replay on the TV from the replay on my computer,..

where do I start ?

many thanks

Philip

[thecoalman]

so I just bought a VCR that can play both formats,it is a DSE ,6 head NICAMIA Hi-Fi Stereo VCR and I have connected this VCR

To start with that may be the the reason you're getting black and white. Black and white can occur for example if you try to capture a PAL signal if you have the capture card set to NTSC or vice versa. Some of those combo units don't actually output a real NTSC signal but convert it to PAL-60. If that is the case it's not going to work trying to capture the footage as PAL or NTSC.

You'll have to check the documentation on the VCR to find out.

Do you still have the cam? Connect that to the capture card and make sure the card is set to NTSC. Also if the VCR does output a true NTSC signal make sure the capture card is set to NTSC.... I'm not really familiar with this problem but I'd imagine if you can hook this VCR up to a PSL TV and it plays a NTSC tape the above scenario that I described would be the problem.

[redwudz]

It looks like you have most of the right tools to start with. One thing, your display video card has really noting to do with capturing or editing, it is just for driving the monitor.

Does your VCR output S-video or just composite? (One RCA video cable.) Probably composite, but that's OK. What's the brand and model of the TV multimedia capture card? What format are you capturing in? The codec used? AVI or MPEG? The capture settings?

There is also a question of interlacing. If you capture in MPEG, it is likely interlaced and will display badly on the computer unless you use a player that can handle interlaced video. If it's not interlaced, it will display badly on a TV that does expect interlace. I'm not very familiar with PAL video, which you are likely going to convert the video to. I usually just convert from PAL to NTSC as that is our format here.

If you can indentify your capture card and detail the settings you used, that would help considerably. There are a lot of members here that do the same sort of conversions and should have a lot more experience with NTSC>PAL conversions. They may also have your same capture card and have some hints there.