Editing a REALLY bad video

[Locut0s]

Right now I have an ATI TV Wonder VE card, but I plan on getting an ATI All-in-Wonder 8500DV card. I have this plan of editing a really old home video of my dads. Here's the history of this thing:

This is a home movie that is probably closing in on 40 years old. The original was in VERY poor condition when somone in my family decided to try to port it over to VHS, to try and salvage some of it. They took it to someone, I have no idea who, and they transfered it to VHS. I am now in posetion of the VHS, or a copy of it, and I would like to see if I can restore it further on my PC, casue it doesn't seem like they tried to do any restorative work on this thing.

There are HUGE portions of this tape which are beyond repaire and which I will most likely just throw away. However there is enough valueable home footage here to try restoring. Contrast seems like the biggest problem through most of the footage, there are large portions where you can tell what is going on but it looks like it was filmed in a cave. Other portions are overexposed and still others are extreamly blury. On top of that there are tons of scratches throughout. I estimate that in all there is probable about 10-15 mins worth of salvageable material, possibly more. Now I tried capturing this on my TV Wonder VE card but it only makes it worse, scenes that were dark before come out pitch black. I'm hopping that the All-in-Wonder 8500DV can retain the detail in the tape. The thing with this video is that there is so much variation from scene to scene that I am considering going through it frame by frame, capture it, export it as individual bitmaps, and edit them in batches or one by one. Now I knoe this is going to entail a HUGE amount of work, but time is not really a problem, I cant take a year if I have to, its just a hobby. The filters in VirtualDub and Premiere just don't offer enough flexibility, especially if I want to really romove all those scratches. Can anyone comment on this idea, and either suggest what they think could be a good alternative or perhaps a good way of going about this? Is the 8500DV's capture likely to be any better than the TV Wonder VE's? If not then what other card would be able to handle thins kind of thing, its important that it be able to capture a dark scene and not make it any worse while retaining the detail thats there without introducing too much noise.

Thanks

[spidey]

You could edit it up in Vdub and Framserve it to TMPG. I believe there's a guid under the CAPTURE section for this.

[Locut0s]

You could edit it up in Vdub and Framserve it to TMPG. I believe there's a guid under the CAPTURE section for this.

Yeah but VirtualDub, although a great program isn't the best video cleaner. Its ok for large or crude adjustments like changing the resolution or overall contrast changes but not for this kind of thing.