Question about video restoring.

[mark23]

Hi. I have some vhs rips from family and friends that suffer from issues such as low lighting, colour banding, wrong tint. I was wondering if I would be able to get a better quality by outputting the files to my camera, recording them to minidv, then recapture them with better colour settings as it goes in, or would using video filters offer the same result? I have an intel Imac so I can't really do much without the machine having to render everything I do. Just wondering if this would provide a superior product than just using a filter and possibly save time as it would solve some of the issues in real time going in rather than having to encode.

Also, can some issues be solved bringing a digital file back to the analog domain and re-digitize, or once it is digital, then the only thing that can fix it is software?

Thanks
Mark

[redwudz]

If you mean use the original VHS tapes and pass them through your camcorder to convert to DV-AVI, that would probably be easier for restoration. You could use AVIDemux as it has a lot of filters and is fairly simple to use and has Mac and other versions available.

Anytime you filter, crop or resize, you would have to re-encode. DV can hold up the quality fairly well with multiple re-encodes back to DV. If you converted a digital file to analog, then back to digital, you would likely have a lot of quality loss. It would be fourth generation or more by the time you converted it back to digital after filtering.

Hardware filtering is another option, but you would still need the original VHS tape and maybe a TBC (Time Base Corrector) and a Proc amp, neither one cheap.