Video Filters

[mpojeep]

Hi,
I hope this is in the right topic section.
My situation is I'm trying to convert all of my home VHS tapes to DVD. Some of these tapes are not in the best conditions.Example of these conditions are:
- some tapes are 3rd or more generations
- some tapes were taken where the subjects are too bright(washout?)
- degradation of color qualities
- video noise(grainy)

I was wondering if there are any video editing/processing hardwares and/or softwares that would correct these problems. If so, would the corrections that these softwares/hardwares offer be significant? Would these improvements be close to a commercial DVD quality?

Thanks,

[Thorn]

If you are willing to buy expensive hardware (and anything good will be expensive) or software, you'd be moving into the pro arena so I can't help there.

However, I've had good luck with Virtualdub filters on VHS material. There are some included filters, such as the temporal smoother (which gets rid of noise that differs from frame to frame - good for analog material) and the smart smoother (separate plugin download - it gets rid of a lot of artifacts). I've also used to use the flaxen VHS filter -- there are several filters intended to do just what you want, but you really do need to play with them a lot and understand how they work to get good results. Every video is different and you do NOT want to overuse the filters, or everything gets blurry.