How can I make a VHS video get a better quality, is there a video software?

[hello0]

I want to digitize my Vhs videos, but when i watch it on my PC, the video quality is not ok,,,,, too much noise etc.

What can I do? Is there a software?

[LMotlow]

VHS is always noisy. No one can help without sample of a capture. You'll need Avisynth and VirtualDub, at least. There are several years of threads about VHS cleanup in this forum and at digitalfaq.com

[johnmeyer]

To echo what LMotlow says, there are dozens -- perhaps hundreds -- of threads with "cookbooks" of how to reduce VHS noise. You should search this forum, digitalfaq.com, and doom9.com. You'll find many posts by me in two of those places, including AVISynth scripts for reducing VHS noise.

Be realistic: you will not be able to add detail or make the video look sharper. You will not be able to make the colors look really great. What you can do is significantly reduce the little dancing dots (noise); you can fix most types of chroma noise (colored specs, certain types of rainbows, etc.); and you can stabilize the footage to remove unwanted camera shake (although to do that well requires quite a bit of time).

[hello0]

thanks, here is a screenshot
https://postimg.org/image/eak67wnm7/

[johnmeyer]

You should also do some research on how to get the best possible capture. There is a very big difference in the quality of VHS video captured using the wrong techniques and that captured using proper techniques. Even if you can't purchase a better VCR or get a TBC, you can still get better quality if you turn ON the EDIT switch. This eliminates all the internal "improvements" in the VCR which actually, somewhat paradoxically, make the video worse by adding artificial sharpening. This in turn degrades detail. Sometimes the "edit" switch is a menu item and may be labeled something different than "edit." Once you get rid of all that sharpening, your video may look "soft" to you, and it may actually appear to have more noise. However, that is good because in addition to passing through the noise, and getting rid of the artificial sharpening (which is actually a halo around all sharp luma transitions), you will end up with a lot more detail. You can then use the tools recommended in the various VHS enhancement threads to remove the noise and, if you want, add a little sharpening, but this noise reduction and sharpening will be done with digital filters that are a hundred times more effective, and less obtrusive, then the simple-minded equivalents done with very cheap analog circuits.

BTW, looking at your screen capture (which looks reasonably good), you may also want to do a little bit of gamma adjustment. Ideally you want to use an NLE or other tool which includes some sort of waveform monitor or histogram so you can set the end points (black and white point) accurately. A calibrated monitor also makes a big difference, because if your monitor is not calibrated, you will make changes to the video to make it fit what you see on the monitor and you'll end up actually making the video worse.

[LMotlow]

Some good tips and notes from johnmeyer.

When you post samples, you need real video, cut but otherwise unaltered and unfiltered from your original capture. We can't do much with a still shot that's been cropped, resized, and in an altered colorspace. You need more info as well, including what hardware and software you used for capture. If you need advice on how to make samples, let us know what format you're working with. You should post edited samples directly in this forum. And please don't use YouTube!

That looks like dot crawl and over sharpening in your image, but it's hard to tell after all the changes from the original.

[hech54]

Is anyone going to ask exactly what video codec he is capturing before you start throwing technical manuals at him or has he mentioned that in another thread somewhere?

[johnmeyer]

The video codec is the least of his worries, I would think. It doesn't matter much for VHS compared to all the other things that need to be addressed in a typical VHS capture/restoration workflow.

[manono]

Is anyone going to ask exactly what video codec he is capturing before you start throwing technical manuals at him or has he mentioned that in another thread somewhere?

johnmeyer did mention:

You should also do some research on how to get the best possible capture. There is a very big difference in the quality of VHS video captured using the wrong techniques and that captured using proper techniques

I didn't really see any 'technical manuals', just some common sense advice. My own opinion is it's less important to know if he capped in high bitrate MPEG-2 or H.264 or DV-AVI or lossless, than some of the other factors johnmeyer mentioned. All that oversharpening probably wasn't in the tape. And as LMotlow mentioned, an actual video would be most useful, and the information you mentioned as well.

Edit: jm beat me to it.

[LMotlow]

Agreed, and some info about the format would help in advising the O.P. how to make a workable sample if he doesn't know.