VHS conversion help

[sjuanie]

Hello, first time posting, very green, new, whatever we call it. Kind of a very important task that I have researched for days and just cant seem to grip what I'm doing. My 25 year anniversary with my wife is this weekend and I had this grand idea of pulling out our 25 year old VHS wedding tape, converting it to eventually watch via my WD TV Live. I went out and bought the pinnacle dazzle and am using my old dual dvd/vcr from Samsung, its 4 head hi-fi stereo. I have it hooked up ok, been toying around with virtualdub, I can capture no problem, but the beginning of the tape is washed out though it tends to get much better after about 4 minutes, and the sound is somewhat distorted. I was just wondering how to get the best quality out of this thing so I can eventually watch through my home server/WD TV live. I have no problem with computers, but I am video challenged. I'm sort of in a hurry as to surprise my wife, we havent seen this thing, well, basically ever. Thanks for your time.

[Brad]

So basically you have tomorrow to solve this and that's it? Oh boy.

[jagabo]

with virtualdub, I can capture no problem, but the beginning of the tape is washed out though it tends to get much better after about 4 minutes

Use the proc amp settings to adjust brightness and contrast before capturing. If necessary, capture in two segments with different proc amp settings then use VirtualDub's ability to append files and cut/trim segments.

If your capture device doesn't have proc amp controls you can filter after capturing. Use the Levels, Brightness/Contrast, etc. filters. You can use the curve editor to limit filters to particular segments of the video.

and the sound is somewhat distorted.

Is it distorted on the tape or only after capturing? If the latter try turning down the capture volume.

[vhelp]

seriously, if you are in a hurry, and can't be bother with too many trial and error runs (thats will it will come down to) then i highly suggest to visit BestBuy and pick up the Toshiba DR430 dvd recorder. it is a disc only system, no hdd. but that should be good enough so that at least you can burn (aurhor) a dvd disk instantly..view it and decide if it is good enough to surprise your wife. it probably will be, specially since she has never seen the footages. plus, you can always tweak the other problems later. just get the unit and play the a tape through it. the dr430 has a very good line tbc in it and will help with stabalizing your tapes for best transfers.

then, between now and saturday, you can post some samples of the mpeg from the dr430's authored disc to your pc -> copy disc '.vob' (or .ts) file(s) to your pc and post a few short segments of the problems you are seeing. then we can help from there.

in any case, post some of the video (of the ones you have now from the dazzle) up to 100MB size is accepted here. send us a lossless if at all possible using the the huffy, lagarith, or UT codec.

[sjuanie]

Yeah, well, maybe I should take my time with this and do it right, I didnt think it would be this difficult, it probably isnt with the right equipment, but my anal brain likes to be a perfectionist so like last night I just keep researching till the wee hours of the morning, as soon as a read an article and think I have it figured out, I double check, read another article and well, here I am asking for help now. Thanks for the ideas, I'm going to look into them and hopefully post a video, until then, its flowers, dinner and a card.

[sjuanie]

One thing I didnt think of and didnt know I could do is capture and then adjust the brightness etc? I figured I had to do that prior to capture, I guess I was thinking like editing photos, the more you do the less the quality. Last question, is Vitualdub my best choice for capturing? Remember, I am using the pinnacle dazzle capture device.
Thanks again.

[jman98]

Yeah, well, maybe I should take my time with this and do it right, I didnt think it would be this difficult, it probably isnt with the right equipment, but my anal brain likes to be a perfectionist so like last night I just keep researching till the wee hours of the morning, as soon as a read an article and think I have it figured out, I double check, read another article and well, here I am asking for help now. Thanks for the ideas, I'm going to look into them and hopefully post a video, until then, its flowers, dinner and a card.

We have an old thread here where the original poster started it in 2011 looking for help with some VHS captures I think he wanted to turn into DVDs and over a year later, he was STILL posting in the thread and had accomplished absolutely nothing because every time he started, the captures didn't meet his standards and he went back to square one. I strongly encourage you to not go down that path of insanity. I don't know if he ever even got one tape captured.

VHS is a really crappy format as you will find out if you start to do these kinds of captures. My suggestion is that at some point you're just going to need to say "Good enough" with what you have and get on with your life. If it's really just a one shot deal, you could pay someone to do it for you. Modesty and forum rules won't let him solicit business, but our long time member Lordsmurf does this sort of thing as a business and he is rather meticulous in his work. If I had a small number of tapes that just had to be in the best quality possible, I'd use him. He swears he gets almost DVD like quality from his work and that's certainly better than I can achieve, but then again, he's pickier than me and has equipment that I don't have. You can go here to find out how to contact him.
http://www.digitalfaq.com/

[sjuanie]

Thanks jman98, to be honest, I'm not that anal.....lol, I know when to give up. I mean, I would love for it to look perfect, but on the other hand, it could be a lot worse, so I dont want to push my luck. It is watchable, it was taken from a professional video company, they took videos of still shots in the beginning, those are mostly washed out, the live video shots are actually pretty good, a few hiccups here and there but I can live with that, I can actually live with the washed out part, but if I can fix it, why not. So basically I just wanted to know which program is the best to capture, then probably put on a DVD for safe keeping. From that point I would probably play around with it to see if I could clean it up, maybe edit a few things out, add some different music, a few words etc. I hope I'm making sense, right now, whats the best program to copy it to DVD to preserve whats left, I probably should have just said that in the first place but thought if there was a program that cleaned while capturing, why not! Hey, thanks again for taking the time, and thanks for the link.

[Brad]

VirtualDub was a good choice. It is one program that will give you direct access to what the Dazzle hardware is presenting to Windows. Others, including the software that came with it, may apply their own processing on top of this but it's better to get an unadulterated capture to work from.

If you have about 25-30GB per hour to spare, capture using one of these lossless video codecs: Lagarith, Ut Video Codec, Huffyuv-MT. Always capture audio in uncompressed format, because compressing it at this stage is only a small gain and causes all sorts of headaches.

To do a quickie DVD from that, look on this site for guides on how to create a DVD-Video compliant disc from an AVI file.

Hope you get it done on time.

[sjuanie]

Thanks vaporeon800, im gonna either learn how to use Virtualdub or just use the Pinnacle studio 14 software, I am more familiar with it, tried it, quality was pretty good. But I will tinker with VirtualDub and see what I can come up with, I love tinkering