What I learned about VHS B&W captures

[fmctm1sw]

Just to share a little experience, I have a lot of very old Three Stooges VHS captures from TV. They are about 15 years old. Not to mention the fact that the actual episodes are from the 30's through the 50's. I noticed that a few filters work rather well. First, the Whitebalance Filter by Jim Leonard. This filter had an interesting side effect by letting me adjust the saturation to -100. This removed any evidence of color (I could see tiny spots in the picture). Set it to +100 and you will see what I mean. This is tape I probably recodred over bunch of times though too. I know... I may be the only one who didn't know about the saturation but oh well, it worked. I also used the built in Temporal Smoother in virtualdub. I noticed setting it above 6 or so will cause strange (and undesirable) effects. For instance, a person with a striped suit is standing still. You can see the detail of the stripes but when the person moves, the suit gets real blurry, until the person stops again. It is very noticable (unwatchable) at the 10 setting and gets virtually unnoticeable at the 6 setting. I used a setting of 5 to be safe.

[Soapm]

Thanks for the tip, I will be doing some B&W's soon and I will give this a try. Not sure if you knew this but when you convert B&W with TMPGEPro you can use the custom color correction filter and set the saturation to -255 for a similar improvement. I was hating watching green and white w/colored spots instead of black and white.

[fmctm1sw]

Thanks for the tip, I will be doing some B&W's soon and I will give this a try. Not sure if you knew this but when you convert B&W with TMPGEPro you can use the custom color correction filter and set the saturation to -255 for a similar improvement. I was hating watching green and white w/colored spots instead of black and white.

Thanks for the reply. I've stayed away from TMPGs filters after I tried "Noise Reduction" and I saw no difference after an eternity of encoding

[tito13kfm]

Good tips.. I too was in the process of encoding 3 stooges episodes.. But these were clean captures from cable TV (well relatively clean). But the temporal smoother made a world of difference set to 2.

[fmctm1sw]

Good tips.. I too was in the process of encoding 3 stooges episodes.. But these were clean captures from cable TV (well relatively clean). But the temporal smoother made a world of difference set to 2.

Yeah, I have some that were satellite TV caps (standard VCD/no filters) and a lot more that were old VHS caps (352x480 @3000kbpsCBR/filters). It will be interesting to see how they look.