Making audio much louder without hiss on captured VHS

[ron_sherman1]

I have a Plextor PX-M402U and have been converting VHS to DVDs on my XP system, fairly successfully - capturing as MPEG2. However, one of the camcorder-created VHS tapes (1983) has very poor audio (voice, no music). My first DVD from it required me to turn the volume to the max when viewing it on the TV and that created heavy hiss. (Some of the video was dark, but I seem to have helped that with basic brightness and capture filters). How can I fix the audio? ? Do I need to capture it as AVI, then spilt into video and WAV, then fix the WAV (how?) and put them back together with WIN-DVD Creator or something like that? Can I do the splitting (if I need to) with MPEG2?

[redwudz]

I tend to use VirtualDub Mod to save out the audio as a WAV. It will accept MPEG or AVI format. I don't process the video there unless I want to convert to Xvid or some other AVI. There are other programs that can do it also.

Then I use the freeware audio editor Audacity to adjust the volume and filter noise as needed. The high and low pass filters are good for hiss and hum. The filtered WAV can be converted back to AC3 with ffmpeggui, then added in with the video when authoring.

[yoda313]

I agree with redwudz. You need to remix the audio from the video. You can use audio editors to do this.

Though I was wondering. Has anyone ever tried hooking up an external graphic equalizer between the vcr and capture card to try to clean the audio live? I mean that way you could adjust the highs and lows before the audio even gets recorded. Hmm... I wonder....

[Mr. Dweezel]

Though I was wondering. Has anyone ever tried hooking up an external graphic equalizer between the vcr and capture card to try to clean the audio live? I mean that way you could adjust the highs and lows before the audio even gets recorded. Hmm... I wonder....

I have stereo mixers hooked up from the cable boxes to the PCs. The volume level
wasn't high enough so this way I can boost is slightly. Seems like your equalizer idea should
work. It has more adjustment points instead of single ones like my mixers.

[daamon]

Hi ron_sherman1,

Welcome to the forums.

This thread of mine may be of use - slightly different circumstances but, in essence, we're trying to achieve the same thing on a WAV file.

https://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?t=274330