Soft SVCDs, Tape Chroma Artifacts

[musicman]

I am encoding my streams from S-VHS sources with MPEG-2: 720x480 / 8-15 mb/s VBR.
The tapes are a bit noisy with chroma artifacts, but I am running the deck through a time base corrector to attempt to reduce some of these artifacts.

When reducing with noise reduction (TMPGENC), the picture is of course, soft. Even when turning the NR off, it is still soft. I believe this to be caused from the remaining chroma artifacts.

My encode parameters are:
2 Pass VBR 300-2520 / 2200 AVG.

Any suggestions on how to clean up this chroma noise out before encoding?

thx,
Musicman

Canopus Amber MPG2 Encoder
TMPGENC 2.57

[snowmoon]

Softness is just the nature of low resolution sources.

I generally use TMPGenc NR ( light on the spatial if you want fine detail ) and then use a sharening filter to bring back some punch to the image ( not too heavy ).