Line Doubler and VHS Capture...

[mcpogue]

Is it possible to use a line doubler to improve the source quality of vhs captures?

Could you connect a line doubler with a TBC, or would the TBC be confused/defeated by a doubler?

Just a hypothetical question...more curiosity than anything else.

Any comments welcome...especially lordsmurfs

"Come to the Blue Side of the Force!"

[gshelley61]

VHS already has 525 interlaced NTSC scan lines (about 483 lines contain video information, so this is sometimes referred to as 480i). Line doublers are used to convert a 525 line interlaced NTSC signal into a progressive scan signal (480p) for displays or projectors that can use and benefit from it. TBC's, capture devices, etc. all take a standard NTSC signal, so you can't use the output from a line doubler or any other scaler for those.

Your best bet is to tweak the VHS image with hardware devices such as TBC's, proc amps, image enhancers (sharpeners), etc. prior to capture.

[edDV]

Also, line doublers are usually display enhancers not intended for recording. Most projectors or progressive HDTVs have built in line doublers that get better with every generation and are optimized to that particular display. If you were to encode the output of todays line doubler into 480p (assuming you could) you would be locking today's technology into the MPeg2 encode. Better to let the future display do it.