At what resolution VHS tapes should be captured?

[IGGYMAN]

I have read a lot of guides on capturing analogue video and I am still not shure.
A VHS tape has a resolution 300x360 pixels NTCS (I dont know for the PAL if you know please tell me) so if you capture it in 720 x 576 it does not make much sense, and from I figured a resolution of 480x576 SVCD
or even 352x288 VCD but in hi bitrates (such as 3000 kbs or 4000 kps) should work fine.

Thanks.

[rhegedus]

I've linked this thread more times than I care to remember - is should be a sticky!

Hi8/VHS to DVD: which bitrate do you recommend?

[IGGYMAN]

Ok,Ok I will search more the next time.

Thanks.

[rhegedus]

Nah, that's not what I'm saying - it's difficult to find because it's a year old. I'm saying it's a very informative thread.

[lordsmurf]

www.lordsmurf.com has guides on this ... quick answer: depends on your card ... typically 352x480 unless your card is a cheap BT chipset that needs 720x480

[Nelson37]

There are lots of logical, theoretical reasons why 352x480 should be more than enough to cap VHS tape. Just one problem - for many, 720x480 looks better. I do not have a BT chip. I have repeatedly tested this with 2 different VCRs, 2 different AIW cards, multiple tapes, several different people viewing unidentified clips. 720x480 looks better.

Don't know if it is improper resizing done by the driver or hardware, or some sort of filter kicking in at a certain resolution. Don't really care. The "why" is less important to me than the final result. Strongly suggest you try different resolutions yourself and decide what looks best.

[dphirschler]

For me, the point of diminishing returns is 640x480. I don't see any improvement for VHS at any resolution above that.


Darryl

[SatStorm]

There are sure updates in this subjects, thanks to objervations and practice tests of various members of this community.

The general rules are
For NTSC you capture the higher you can, you filter, you encode to the framesize you wish.
Before capturing, you may - or not - need hardware correction preperations, like TBC. The nature of this system (NTSC) is full of bad suprises when you capture....

With PAL the general rule is to capture at the framesize of your target project, filter the least you can and encode.

But it is more complicated this "general" rule

With Nvidia and the latest ATI cards, you can capture at the framesize of your target project with no issues.
But with the BT8xx(x) cards and the unofficially btwincap wdm drivers, the situation is really far complicated.
Those drivers are beta and had issues. Also change from time to time...
At the current stage, it seems that when you have a bt8xx(x) card, you don't really capture what you think. What you see is a result of a resizing, so issues rise. So, if you wish for your 100% of your card, you need advance methods to use. For example, capture at 368 x 480/576 and then resize to 344 x 480/576 and add borders (expand) to 352 x 480/576.
If you wish to capture realtime mpeg 2 with software like mainconcept 1.4.1, those cards have quality only if you capture at 704 x 480 / 576 or 720 x 480 / 576

Complicated huh?

Well, the "safe mode" for those who don't like to dig really into this, is to capture at 704 x 576. On some cards is an overkill (which doesn't harm, except the filesizes of your captures), on some others a framesize close to their best abilities and on some others the only framesize which actually captures for real.
The encoding part is a different subject. Depending the encoder you use, the filtering you do to your captures or the source you have, it varies a lot. I could say that the "safe mode" here is a CBR @6000 for a 704 x 576/480 source. for the 70% of your projects, this would be overkill, for the 25% you need more bitrate and for a lucky 5% is what you exactly need.

About VHS now. This is an old story, which anyone has an opinion. My opinion is like this:

VHS is ~ 352 x 288/240 on a ~ 352 x 576/480 carvas. You can't capture the correct resolution, you can capture the carvas. Then you can try to reconstract the real resolution (impossible for NTSC for mpeg 2 technical reasons, but it is possible with PAL) or to emulate the carvas. It works far better (and easier) that way.
Unfortunatelly, even if the DVD Specifications determine various framesizes, most (cheaper) DVD standalones support well only the "commercial" ones, which are 720 x 576/480 or 704 x 576/480. They do work with the other framesizes, but without quality optimazations, so you end up with bad picture. In practice, only the DVD standalones who supports SVCD are handling well those other framesizes.
That explains why some captures and encodes which are overkill for VHS sources, are looking better on DVDs than others, who by the book are what you all need for VHS/SVHS.

Same story and with the 352 x 288 Interlace PAL projects. All DVD standalones play discs like those, and the quality is really VHS like. But the cheap ones show them really bad, a tremble picture if you ask me. Those cheap ones, have a common chip for digital to analogue convertion, both for PAL and NTSC units. I'm talking for the same cheap standalones which offers "PAL progressive output"...
Well, those ones, play 352 x 288 really bad, because they can't handle interlace 352 x 288. So they handle it as progressive and you have an awfull and unstable picture...

There are so many things on all this, you end up learning stuff you wouldn't imagine that exists...

[buick]

While we are on this subject I would like to ask what bitrate would be recomended from vhs or HI8 to dvd would be recomended and also I have a ati 8500dv card and I also have a dac-100 for firewire capture. What would give the best raw capture do you feel to encode ? Thanks

[Kevin abq]

Iggyman,
Well, you've discovered that opinions are like ....well, you know Everybody's got one. Everyone has a "right" way to do it. Probably the best thing for you to do is experiment because everybody's opinions of "good enough" or "excellent" are also scattered all over the board. Only you can decide what works best for you. Good luck

[handyguy]

Easiest way to do from vhs or HI8 to dvd is just get a dvd recorder like a Panasonic e50 then you don't have to concern yourself with any settings as these do it all automatically.

[macleod]

I agree with handyguy on getting a standalone. You are going to beat your brains in (unless you like that) getting the quality that you want. A recorder IS the way to go to get perfect quality.

Handyguy, I was wanting to know if you know of an application that would put closed captioning on a VHS to DVD (home video or otherwise). I have converted my home movies over and I want my brother, who is deaf, to have the benefit of any talking that goes on in the home movie. Or if I were to back up a commercial VHS tape. I figure that when I reauthor, I can add that as subtext, but was wanting to know if you know of anything that could also do it.

[lordsmurf]

I agree with handyguy on getting a standalone. You are going to beat your brains in (unless you like that) getting the quality that you want. A recorder IS the way to go to get perfect quality.

Realize it requires pretty much perfect source though, as most of these recorders deal poorly with degraded source.

[isidro]

Although it's an old thread this might help other:

If you try to capture without compressing you might run into HD bottleneck at higher resolutions, if you use a slow compressor (h264) CPU will be the bottleneck.
Try compressing video with HUFFYUV or better with Lagarith Lossless Codec for realtime capture.
Usually for VHS you should use PAL: 704x288 or NTSC: 640x240. The key is to use half vertical size (VHS only have half of vertical anyway), that will save a lot of realtime process and will avoid all interlacing problems (no need to deinterlace later). With that limited resolution you shouldn't have drop frames. Later you can resize and save to a better compression format like h264 or h265.

[jagabo]

Usually for VHS you should use PAL: 704x288 or NTSC: 640x240. The key is to use half vertical size (VHS only have half of vertical anyway)

This is wrong. PAL VHS has 576 discreet scan lines. NTSC has 480. If you capture at 288/240 you will be missing half the picture and will have noticeably jagged edges.

[pandy]

Exactly as jagabo wrote, 704 (720)x576 25Hz and 704(720)x480(486) 30000/1001Hz for NTSC. VCR records full video frame i.e. two fields. Horizontal bandwidth (not resolution however resolution is related to bandwidth) is around 2 - 3MHz max for non S-Video capable VCR and around 4.2 - 4.8MHz for S-Video capable VCR (3MHz for 720 standard is approximately 320 pixels so let say 352 to do easier calculation, 4.8MHz S-Video is approx 512 pixels but recommended and commonly used resolution is 576 (so 576x576 for PAL or 576x480(486) on NTSC - however capture of source shall be done with highest possible resolution due a way how analog signal is digitized trough Analog-Digital Converter) - oversampling is one of the most important digital signal processing techniques - final resolution (352 or 480 or 576 or 640 or 704 or 720) can be set trough resizing/scaling (resampling) algorithm.

[dellsam34]

Very informative.