Noise at bottom 2% and black at left 1% when capturing VHS

[hohel]

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

I have a 2.8 Gig Pentium 4, 512 Meg memory, 120 GB 7200 RPM drive for capture, a Sony DRU-510A DVD writer (have not used it yet), and a DAC-100. I am running WinXP

I would like to capture, edit, and transfer material from my VHS tapes of my family to DVD.

I believe that I have the dip switches on my DAC-100 set correctly (I have tried several settings, and it seems that just having switch 4 ON may be best).

Whenever I capture material from any VHS tape that I recorded (some old, some new), I have noise lines at the bottom 2%, and a solid black area (not exactly a stright line, but wavy) at the left 1%.

I have tried this with several capture programs (e.g., Premier 6.5, etc.), and using 2 different VCRs (1 with S-video out, 1 without - the one without S-video [with is older] for some reason produces a better capture picture [I purchased the JVC VCR for the S-video output, to hopefully improve quality, but that does not appear to be the case]), with the same result on the bottom and the left.

Will this noise and black area appear when I finally make the DVDs or will it disappear? Is there some tool I need to run? [I searched this site and other places on the internet, but could not find an answer to this]

Also, any experience with the JVC HR-S2901U for capturing (I did set it in edit mode, as specified in the manual)?

Thank you very much in advance.

Hagai Ohel
hohel@bellsouth.net

[lgh529]

This is normal, and you won't see it on your TV because it will clip about 5% of the picture all the way around. Now if you intend to watch the DVD's on your computer monitor, they will show up.

If it bugs you that much, you could clip it using TMPGEnc when you do your encoding. AviSynth will also do it. I'm sure that there are others as well. I personally never bother since I watch my DVD's on my TV and not my computer monitor.

Hope that helps.

[nick1977]

The noise at the bottom of the picture is always there if capped from VHS. It is there in the original, but it is usually below the viewable screen area on modern TV sets. If you create a DVD I would be 99% sure that you would not be able to see it when playing back on a TV. The only thing you might want to do if you're particularly bothered by it is to add a black border in place of the noise. It may help to make the compresion to MPEG2 *marginally* better too.

Nick

[hohel]

Thank you Nick. Do you know about the 1% of the left also?

Anyone sure if these effects will disappear if I do not put a black border (I do not even know how to do this)?

[IJM]

The only thing you might want to do if you're particularly bothered by it is to add a black border in place of the noise. It may help to make the compression to MPEG2 *marginally* better too.

Hi,

Yep. The top, bottom and both sides of the picture are clipped by the TV. In fact its surprising just how much of the picture you don't see. I clip these areas on my captures too.

However, to make a saving on the compression, I've read that you'd be better clipping the picture in units of 8 or 16 pixels. This is because most MPEG compression algorithms are optimised around smoothing and motion searching. So it makes it awkward for it to encode nice straight lines like the edge of your picture and can end up using more bitrate to do so. But MPEG primarily works in macroblocks which are sized in units of 8 or 16 pixels. So by clipping your picture to a multiple of 8 or 16, you should make a saving.

I hope this helps.

Ian.

[hohel]

Thank you.

Now, any ideas about the VCR? (i.e., why more distortion with a new VCR with S-video out, as opposed to an older VCR)

[nick1977]

I've noticed that with modern (and therefore cheaper) VCR's, that the picture can display more noise. I don't know whether the manufacturers cut corners to keep the costs of the units down, or whether they believe that a slightly sharper picture with noise, is better than a shofter picture with less noise.
But yes, I have seen numerous VCR's in the past few years that display exactly the same characteristics. None of them come close to my Dads SVHS Panasonic bought in about 1990 (although that was £1,000!).

Nick