Making an MPEG better?

[andyr74]

I captured an old VHS tape using an Hauppage PVR150 card. The tape is maybe 15 years old (or maybe more) and is of a family reunion. So the quality isn't that great.
Now I have a mpeg file of +- 3.5 GB.

The things i want to do are:
- denoising it a bit (don't know if it will help much)
- Take the brightness a bit up. The picture is a bit dark.
- Making a new mpeg so i can burn it to DVD to watch it on a standalone player.

I thought of doing it this way:
- loading the mpeg in VDUB mpeg or VDUB Mod
- Using an deinterlaced filter? --> should i do this?
- applying filters for denoising and brightness (full processing mode)
- saving it as an uncompressed AVI (don't care if this a very large file)
- reconvert it to mpeg with TMPGEnc.

Is this method the good one? Or how can I solve this the best way?

[harley2ride]

If you search for Virtualdub settings, and avisynth scripts here, you will find some recommended settings for a good starting point to clean up video. You will have to play and tweak from there to further adjust. You don't want to deinterlace, if you end result is going to dvd or for being played back on TV. You need to deinterlace if you are going to put your video on the web, or if you capture stills from your video, you will need to deinterlace if you are printing photos of the stills.The Restoration forum has some good information on VirtualDub and Avisynth.

[mpiper]

I would recommend reading some of the guides you can find at tyhe doom9.org and neuron2.net websites. I have a few filters I like to use when converting video tapes.

They are, in order of application in Virtualdub:
1. Deinterlace (unfold mode)
2. levels (sampled at several points in the video to get best gamma setting
3. MSU Denoising
3a. (for cartoons only) a SmartSmoother filter
4. MSharpen
5. Deinterlace (Fold mode)

I deinterlace for the filters, so that any movement between fields will not affect the other filters, then re-interlace to return to the original interlaced format.

Never deinterlace a videotape that was created straight by videocamera or for TV. These use a 29.97 frames per second technology that actually takes 59.94 snapshots per second and interlaces them for smoother motion and more detail. Deinterlacing should only be used for videos that were originally created in Film, which took 24 snapshots per second and the 29.97 rate was created afterwards for video. Deinterlacing a film-source video must be by 3:2 pulldown, which re-creates the original 24 frame per second video file. Any other form of deinterlacing is destructive to the original images and will lose detail. Video has little enough detail without intentionally removing even more when we try to convert the image. remember, DVD format will accept both 29.97 interlaced video and 24 progressive and play both correctly on your TV.

[andyr74]

I want to do 2 things with my recorded movie (PAL movie recorder with a hauppauge PVR150):
1) burn it to DVD
2) make a backup of the mpeg in XVID or DIVX (to watch on the pc or for taking snapshots)

So this is what i'm going to do with vdub-mpeg:
for DVD (like mpiper said):
1. Deinterlace (unfold mode) = standard vdub filter
2. MSU Denoising
3. MSU brightness filter
4. Deinterlace (Fold mode)
5. saving as uncompressed avi or frameserving it to TMPEGenc and recode

for the backup to avi
1. Deinterlace
2. MSU denoising
3. MSU brightness filter
4. resizing to 640x480
5. saving as avi with xvid or divx coded (lets say +- 700 MB for 45 min of movie)

Does this sound ok or are there any remarks?

[Abond]

I would firstly try to capture with highest bitrate possible. I have PVR 250 and usually capture at 15 Mbps 720x576.

[jagabo]

You should recapture the video with your PVR-150. You can use its proc amp controls to brighten the image, and its noise filters to reduce the noise.

From WinTV2000 click on the PREF button, press the Colors tab. You'll find the proc amp controls there.

To adjust the noise filters you'll need to download a program like this one:

http://www.shspvr.com/download/hcwpp2ut.zip

Other PVR apps and tips:

http://www.shspvr.com/