Cleaning up DV footage

[mikeveli]

Hey,

I've been capturing from a VHS source to DV using a TBC-1000 and DAC-100, but the video always looks like garbage when it's done capturing. I'm capturing at a resolution of 720x480 so that's not the problem and my VHS source tapes are in good quality and sometimes look even better than the capture DV footage which is very pixelated, washy, etc.

My question is if anyone knows an effective method of cleaning up DV footage so that it looks REALLY good. I've tried using VirtualDub with some filters and that's helped a bit, but it's still not the greatest. If anyone has any methods I would glady like to know about them. Thanks,

Mikeveli

[sitlet]

if its coming out crappy, its probably your capture device or your analog to digital converter. i doubt its the software thats making it look bad.

[nelson133]

I use a canopus box and no tbc and have recently found (many thanks to this site) that by using virtualdub I can clean up a vhs capture pretty well. I frameserve from virtualdub using various filters (still playing with this one) into the encoder (still playing with a couple of these too).
That being said, I am not familiar with the dac and don't know if your problem may at least partially come from it. Another trick I use is to resize the dv files to 352 x 480 as this is better resolution than vhs and will let you get a higher bitrate for the same disk space, thereby improving quality. Nyah Levi

[Safesurfer]

I've found this to be a pretty good guide - using Vdub filters and Avisynth.

http://arstechnica.com/guide/audio-visual/video-cleanup/cleaning-1.html

[nsdn]

Actually I never tried a bridge before but I found this method works quite well.

Capture the analogue video with iuVCR using a DV codec and a TV capture card.....then u have your DV.

I then edited the analogue in this form (well now DV), then when I wanted to make a DVD I used DVD2SVCD in AVI2DVD mode and pluged in a temporal smoother, used very light settings, the result was nearly as good as the original VHS/source material.