Quality to expect?

[distendad]

Can the reproduced quality be similar to the original?

I have Nero 6 Delux used to process video from a new VCR reading a commercial movie tape that is input into nero with an ATI 8500 Wonder card, and burned with a Plextor 708AB. My OS is Win XP Pro on a Pentium 4 running over 2 GHz. The intermediate results are recorded on a nearly empty 100 GB 7200 rpm secondary drive. The burned DVD plays, but the quality is significanly worse than playing the video tape directly to the same TV as a standalone DVD player that was used to test the trial DVD. The problem is grainy video images, poor image resolution, and loss of audio sync after frame dropouts.

From this site, I learned about VitualDub and the capture guide tutorial by Doom9. Following Doom9 can I reach my aim of good reproduction; is it worth the effort?
Carl D

[sacajaweeda]

Transferring VHS to DVD is messy. Lots of variables. Lots of noise. Use the best VCR and connectors available and you're still going to get noise that you'll have to filter out. Tape jitter can cause dropped frames and noise. Just using a PCI capture card in itself gets you a certain amount of noise no matter what your source is, but you can usually clean it up to get acceptable results. You're not really losing resolution, per se, because VHS resolution is even less than the smallest DVD-legal frame size. Me personally I don't usually capture VHS to anything larger than 352x480 because in most cases you're really not gaining a whole lot quality-wise and capturing at full D1 is just that much noise to filter...

That said, with a little effort, VHS can usually be backed up to DVD and close to original results can be expected, especially with newer (quality) VHS source, and even though you may not get an exact reproduction, what you do get will look exactly the same no matter how many times you play it, unlike the VHS which degrades with each viewing, so overall it's worth the effort...

MY $.02

[Gazorgan]

I concure: VHS to DVD is tricky. You are generally dealing with mediocre (mass produced) tapes. Throw in a $70 cheap VCR and you get noise.

On the upside, with patience and practice you can eliminate the problems. A decent VCR (with S-Video out), and good capture card (S-Video in), and a computer with good RF shileding (goooooooood luck!! unless you build your own). That's the hardware side. Throw in good quality cables and proper grounding (UPS are bad for this). Dropped frames are always bad, but that's a hardware issue generally. Old/stretched tapes can contribute to the problem, but again an external TBC (time base corrector) can sometimes help.

In post production you filter some of the noise out, crop off the overscan tearing you typically see at the bottom, and generally correct for tape issues. This can be a laborious process until you get the feel for what filters do what.

Final product shouldn't be any higher than 352x480 (NTSC, 352x576 PAL), this is known as 1/2 D1 resolution. VHS tape doesn't have enough data to do full DVD resolutions (hence why it looks so 'bad' when compared to a DVD version).

[WuphonsReach]

You left out the fun of A/V sync issues...

On a 2Ghz machine, expect to spend around 2 hours processing the video through a filter for every hour of source material at 1/2 D1 (352x480 30fps). With planning, you can queue this up for overnight processing.

If you don't have a good audio card, expect to spend 30 min per hour of source cleaning up your audio using Cool Edit 2000 or the like. Add another 30 min per hour of source if you have bad A/V sync issues as you attempt to stretch the audio track to fit.

It's doable, I do around 8-10 hrs/wk of VHS to DVD which is about all I can keep up with (only 2 machines, one for MPEG2 encoding, one for working on the raw captures).