Best setting to capture VHS footage with premiere pro cs6?

[VHS-C98]

Hi guys,

Need some expert advice. I have some footage to digitise and wanted to know the best way to set up the project in premiere pro in terms of resolution, capture and export settings.

I am all good with capturing the footage. Just a matter of the technicalities of what settings to use for the project and also best setting and files etc to export it to achieve the best result that can be achieved with VHS footage.

Regards

[LigH.de]

Use the native resolution of your capture card, especially the correct number of lines (height) and frame rate according to your video standard (PAL or NTSC); some cards prefer the ITU-R BT.601 width of 704 samples, a few instead an overscan width of 720 samples. Select a video mode with chroma subsampling YUV 4:2:2 (usually UYVY or YUY2) as base, and save it with lossless compression ... well, in fact, I would recommend using VirtualDub over Premiere Pro to capture, there are many guides about it, and you can be certain that it does the best for the intended use.

Me, personally, I would not even trust any commercial application to not prefer RGB colorspace unnecessarily. But I would be sure that VirtualDub will stay in YUV 4:2:2 if I want it to.

[VHS-C98]

Hiya,

Many thanks for the swift reply. If it helps, i am using the ADVC 300 to capture the VHS footage onto Premiere Pro CS6. So does that change the above advice in anyway? My laptop does not have a capture card suitable to connect the analogue camcorder to capture so i am using the ADVC 300 to capture the footage onto my windows laptop and the footage is PAL.

[LigH.de]

Sounds like you will use a device which can capture analogue video signals (probably Top Field First) and output DV via IEEE1394 (certainly Bottom Field First) at only 3.125 Mbps (look, quantization artifacts). Not quite the best possible solution regarding quality. And what do you mean by "laptop" when it comes to video editing? Don't they prefer energy saving hardware, e.g. slower harddisks?

[SameSelf]

When you open PP and create a new project, just be sure to select whatever project settings match your video. I am not from PAL land, but I suspect it will look something like PAL 50i. You should definitely find it in the choices. But I am not even sure it matters in CS6. Just launch PP and hit F5. Unless you are getting strange results, it should automatically capture with the "best settings".

Where the rubber really meets the road is your player and the ADVC 300. You want to make sure the gain is not clipping, that NR reduction on the ADVC is not too strong or maybe even switched off, stuff like that. PP should behave fairly agnostically.

But post back here if you are getting unsatisfactory results.