VHS taped under low light condition: how can I capture it?

[rocraz]

Hi there all,

I have almost 20 VHS-C tapes and would like to capture all of them to my computer, which is an Athlon XP 1800, 512MB RAM, 40Giga HD (7200 ATA100) and an ATI AIW RADEON 8500DV capture card running WindowsXP. Most tapes were shot using SP, but there are some using EP (low speed).
I use Ulead VideoStudio 6.0 and can capture without problems (to AVI or MPEG) the tapes that I shot under daylight conditions, but the ones I shot during lowlight conditions (indoor) are not good: now and then there are "lights" clearing parts of the video, although they play well on my TV. I also tried using VirtualDub with no help. Is there anything I can do? Any filters I could use to solve this under Ulead VS or VirtualDub?
For those wondering why I´m not in DigitalVideo world, I´m buying a Sony TRV17 miniDV camera. This way I guess I will stop having this kind of problem.
Hope anyone can help me out.
TIA,
Rodolfo Vaz

[spidey]

You have tried to add the brightness filter in Virtual Dub right ? This will brighten the whole thing, so it will brighten it, but could over "expose" in some other parts.

I'd capture as an uncompressed avi (huffyuv - preferrably w/ Vdub), then frameserve into TMPG, but add your brighten filter in Vdub before starting the frameserver

[kinneera]

I would guess the video is also pretty grainy? If so, I would also suggest some noise reduction filtering. I've been very impressed with TMPGEnc's noise reduction filter for this, but if you need to do it in VirtualDub, a combination of a good spatial and temporal smoother should do the trick. Lowlight noise is terrible from the perspective of an MPEG encoder, so reducing it should substantially improve the overall quality.

[rocraz]

Hi there,

I tried capturing video with Ulead VS6 and then processing it with TMPGEnc, but the result was far away from good. If you (or anyone) could spend some time, I have a 5 sec (900K) video with this problem which can be downloaded at www.rodolfo.org/video.htm
Maybe it will be easier to understand my problem after seeing this video...
TIA,
Rodolfo Vaz

[kinneera]

OK, I checked out the clip...that's a tough one. A couple of questions:

Was the camera jittering that much during filming, or would that seem to be another artifact of the capture/encode?

Are you capturing directly to MPEG?

[rocraz]

Yes, this is a tough one.

No, the camera was not jittering at all. I was told the problem is due to the lack of light. I was also told there´s a Videonics equipment (not to be used with computers) that can help solve this problem, but I would like to solve it with the computer, as the Videonics equipment is expensive.
I was also told that VHS tapes have a very small track for luminance and that´s the source of my problem (lack of ligth + small track of VHS tape). That´s where the videonics equipment begins its work.
As I told before, when playing to my TV one cannot see the problem we see on the MPEG video file that you have downloaded. I didn´t expect this problem because everything is OK on TV (although it is dark...).

Yes, I´m capturing directly to MPEG. I tried capturing to AVI but the problem persists. In fact, even before capturing I can see the problem while previewing the tape on the computer through the capture software (VirtualDub or VideoStudio 6).

Thanks for trying to help me.

OK, I checked out the clip...that's a tough one. A couple of questions:

Was the camera jittering that much during filming, or would that seem to be another artifact of the capture/encode?

Are you capturing directly to MPEG?

[rocraz]

Hi there guys,

I have just found out what the problem was: I live in Brazil and we do use PAL-M, but as my Camcorder is an imported JVC it is NTSC. Because of that, my VCR "reads" NTSC and "converts" to PAL-M. Somehow the conversion is not very good on some tapes (I couldn´t find a pattern), but I used a friend´s VCR (which "reads" NTSC and "outputs" NTSC) and the analog capture worked out fine.
I can select PAL or NTSC on my RADEON 8500DV and now all analog captures are really fine!
Thank you all for trying to help me.
Rodolfo