VHS Capture results in poor Quality ??

[Gritz]

Capturing VHS tapes (using S-Video cable) from my VCR player to my GE Force4 Gainward video card with MyDVD software under the " Best " quality results in poor quality on the final DVD playing to my TV, and also has the same appearance on my PC playing with WINDVD. It does not appear that way in the preview as it is being captured. My PC is an Athlon XP 1800 & my hd is an 80GB WD, and 512 MB of Ram. The final appearance looks like newspaper print (very large dots). Something very wrong here ... but I can't figure it out! Any help greatly appreciated.

Gritz

[Tbear]

Going to need more info on how you captured and encoded. Programs and settings used.

[Gazorgan]

A couple of points:

VHS is roughly 352x288 in resolution. It is an analog media, but that's the approximate resolution you can expect from VHS tape. So, if you are capturing to DVD or SVCD resolution, it can look 'blocky'.

Your 'preview' when capturing is done with a video overlay, it doens't have anything to do with what the card has actually captured. It is what's being inputed to your card, not what it captured.

What format/codec are you capturing to? If you are capturing directly to SVCD or VCD, you lose the benefits of filters and other functions normally done during encoding. Also, if you are capturing using a lossy codec (MPEG2, MPEG1, DivX, etc) instead of Huffyuv or MJPEG at 90%+(Mjpeg is virtuossly lossless, especially with a VCR signal), you will get a degraded picture. You should roughly capture, filter, resize/crop, encode.

[CUBANAZO]

Gritz:

This is just what I've been doing to get my VHS tapes to DVD so far. Note that everybody's concept of quality might be different. I view my DVD’s in a 36" Sony WEGA....the quality of my Mpegs is excellent....I would say I'm not losing anything during the conversion.

I used to have an ATI TV Wonder VE but after trying a lot I went ahead and bought an ADVC-100 from CANOPUS (The best choice I have ever made).
From my VCR to my ADVC-100 I’m running Monster cables (to minimize the loss).
Once I capture my movie I end up with a file that’s 720x480…….now you have 2 choices depending on how long your movie is:

1-If you are planning to capture between 1-1.5 hours I recommend you to keep the resolution at 720x480 and use a high bit rate. Is not worth to resize (you lose a little bit, just a little bit of quality) during the encoding process and you’ll be using one disc anyway.

2-If you are trying to fit more than 1.5 hours then you can resize the file to 352x480 and lower the bit rate to 3500-4000….that is more than enough for a VHS tape

To encode I use TMPGEnc Plus ……I set quality to 100% (some will say I’m a quality freak….it’s up to you)….If the space is available I use it. I mostly encode home movies and backup my little girl Videos and those are usually under one hour. I did some DVD’s of “Bear in the Big Blue House” at 352x480 and I was able to fit 4 episodes (~30 min each) in one DVD. Again, the quality was excellent. None of my DVD’s looks blocky, no matter how complex the scenes might be and some times they really are, especially in home videos.
If you post more info about how you are encoding yours we could try to guide you in the right direction. Unfortunately there no other choice than practice and “a$$ time” in front of your PC to come up with the right answers. The guides in this Site are excellent and the forum is full of ideas…some good, others not that good…..read a lot, as much as you can and keep on trying.


Good luck
Cubanazo

[Gritz]

Hey guys, I really appreciate the help and I'm just getting into this video thing so I've got my homework ahead of me. I was hoping for a single program that would do it all for me and that was my excursion into MyDVD. No technical info is provided in the program MyDVD, and the settings are VCD, SVCD, and DVD, with a quality selection of "Good", "Better" and "Best" for capturing. NTSC and PAL ... that's it, and the resulting file is mpg. Most of the VHS tapes are ones I've recorded in the past with just VHS, but transfering them to DVD (or SVCD) causes a quality loss. Not blocky, but like a newspaper picture blown up too large. The quality nowhere near matches the stills that I do with Picture2TV, although I suppose they wouldn't since they are motion picures. So I guess my first step is to find a capture program that works with higher quality it seems .... like VirtualDub? I see that I also need the Huffyuv codec ...... and I did try to install it but on XP, when you right click on a *.inf file there IS no "install" selection. So ... I think the the appropriate files need to be put manually into the Windows\System directorys? It would seem if I get a better capture ... then ... could I not drag the results to MyDVD for the final compilation to DVD? Thanks for your patience ..... I'm learning ...

Gritz

[musher70]

try a demo from ulead, such as dvd workshop, thats
what alot of people use, i capture at 720x480 for a
90min to 2 hr film 90 min=6000 120=4500 cbr,vbr
sometimes i go over, and i hate 2 reencode, most
look ok on 32"sony trinitron...hope it helps

[Gritz]

Thanks Musher .... I will go to their site and get the demo and give it a try ..... I will keep trying until I get it right!! :^)

[dilligaf]

MyDVD has a habit of decoding the audio to pcm (huge file size) which gives you less space on the dvd for video. The Ulead products are preferable

[Gritz]

Ok ... I'm up to my neck now just barely treading water. Finally used Virtualdub to capture (had to manually insert the Huffyuv codec in the Registry in XP Professional) and made multiple attempts to get a succesfull avi .... finally did (kept losing the sound - line-in selection shuts off on each reboot for some reason) but the final capture using Huffyuv and NTSC 720x480 was almost 54GB (53,683,786) which seems a little high to me. I used one of the guides in vcdhelp as close as I could follow even though some of the pictures did not match the software I have (latest Virtualdub). Now this may be overkill for capturing the movie "Always" from VHS but I'm trying for the best quality. I also tried using the PICVideo MJPEG Codec but it overlays the words "MJPEG" and something else on the final picture ... must be because it's not registered? In any case I'm now encoding with TMPGenc (I hope as I'll check in the morning) showing the following : DVD NTSC_4_Lowresolution (MPEG-2 352X240 29.97 FPS VBR 3250K and I'm seeing the words "Analyzing" across the Preview as it's encoding (which by the way is VERY framey). I see the final result will be 2 files (one video *.M2V and one audio *.wav). MY QUESTION IS: What will my next step be with these 2 files since they are separate? Will it be a program like AVI2MPG ? Any guidance appreciated ........

Gritz

[stecj]

I am trying to capture live tv at the highest quality possible to burn to DVD. I have a 2.4GHz computer with the Visiontek Xstasy everything capture card. Currently, I am using WinDVR 2.0, but I have tried most PVR type software programs. The think that caught my eye in the thread is the comment about MPEG2 and huffy codec... I haven't done a thing but use what comes with the software. Am I missing a basic change here? Also, I capture at the DVD quality setting and have even tried customizing it and capturing at 9000 versus the default 6400 or so. My captures always have a pixelation or blockiness to them.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Stecj

[vhelp]

stecj, and others..

You may want to visit this thread that I esponded to, as it may help eleviate
some of the mysteries:

https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=143834

stecj,
again, your issue may be due to two items:
* source quality, and then some
* Interlaced source
* source may be Telecined/IVTC/Interlaced etc.
* your method of, in addition to encoding, will have some play in your final
..encode quality.

Again, VHS source materials is very noisy. You have to find some Filter
Cleaning method(s) which I and others here refer to as, "Filter Chain"
You need a good "Filter Chain", for your VHS source. Satellite and higher,
will not really need such. Only VHS.
So, factor this into the final output quality, equation.

-vhelp