What are the best filters for VHS captures?

[mpwr5]

I'm capturing VHS tapes to burn on DVD-R. VirtualDub and AVISynth have a amazing variety of filters that can be applied. I'd appreciate some guidance on where to get started.

When dealing with video captured from VHS tapes, are there some filters you guys always use, sort of as "standard operating procedure", even when the capture looks "fine"?

And when you're dealing with particularly crappy VHS (aging tapes, etc.), are there some filters you turn to to clean it up as much as possible?

[TheInformer]

I use the Dynamic Noise Reduction filter, with a strength between 12 and 18 for just about every VHS tape I convert.

[RoopeT]

Avisynth TemporalSmoother(2,1) does a good job removing slight VHS noise without slowing the encoding too much. You need to load the plugin "mpeg2dec.dll" to be able to use this filter. Also, cropping ~16 lines from top and bottom helps a bit (those lines aren't shown on TV anyway).
Using avisynth leaves you with the freedom of making how many passes you might want to with CCE, with VirtualDubs frameserver you have to do CBR/CQ VBR. Avisynth is also faster in frameserving than VDub.

[RoopeT]

For particularly crappy sources, avisynths SpatialSoftenMMX filter can do miracles, but I rarely use it as it is very slow.

[Triffid]

There are number of filters available here.

http://www.virtualdub.org/virtualdub_filters

Following the links further you can get to here:

http://sauron.mordor.net/dgraft/

Where you will find Flaxens VHS filter. I have found this to be very good at removing the colour noise, without messing up the luminance. Used together with Virtualdubs own TV filter (either 5x5 or 3x3 IQ soften) it makes a very stable looking picture.

If your problems also occur in the luminance realm, then I agree that some of the temporal smoothers can really help...but don't use too much as you can create some 'ghosting' which is probably worse than you are starting with (also temporal filters don't frame serve...or so I have read...so you need to save the smoothed file first)

Hope this helps

[Roginator]

I've recently discovered the great VirtualDub filter SmartSmoother 1.1

It has a preview capability where you can drag a slider and instantly see the noise as it disappears.

I also use a temporal smoother in Avisynth, but try to set it as low as possible so that scenes with motion don't look too weird.

SpatialSmoother 1.0 looks a LOT like SmartSmoother 1.1

[chano]

I use Virtual Dub's Noise Reduction filter on capture. In the capture menu, Video/Noise Reduction/Enable and in the Threshold setting i use 1/8 (where 0 is min and 1 is max) if the source is low noise and 1/4 if high noise. More than 1/4 produce a ghosting effect.
Try it! :P

[WarpEnterprises]

My filter chain is:
1. deinterlace (internal) - unfold (because the following doesn't handle interlaced correctly)
2. rmPAL (PAL line color noise elimination filter by Peter Schweizer
) - removes red/green lines
3. deinterlace (internal) - fold
4. resize precise blinear (to VCD or SVCD resolution)
5. Jim Casaburi's 2D Cleaner Optimized for Speed by Jaan Kalda - threshold 5, radius 1
6. VHS (flaXen) - only Stabilizer enabled, Luma 5, Chroma 10, Temp.Error 1000, Temp.Bias 5
As you see the settings for 5. und 6. are quite weak, but else you get noticeable blurring,...
All filter are linked to on sauron.mordor.net/dgraft

[Tsunami]

1. denoiser (deflicker modified by fish) 10 or 12 max 14
2. rmpal
3. smartsmoother (5, 35)
4. resize (optimized with fitcd)

no deinterlacing, because mpeg2 looks better.

[Devnull]

The VHS filter has messed up the colors for me. I am currently using Dynamic Noise Reduction, Static Noise Reduction and SmartSmoother. It doesn't look noisy at all and gets rid of the lines I get in captures but it loses a lot of sharpness, it's an acceptable tradeoff. It also makes it darker so I have to increase the gamma.

[C53248]

I had too much ghosting using the noise reduction in VirtualDub during capture, but I use TMPGEnc's noise reduction filter with maximum settings and beautiful results with no ghosting whatsoever.

[bbb]

With VD,

1.Static Noise Redution (version RGB settings)
(Red threshold: 1, Green threshold:1, Blue threshold:1)
2.Dynamic Noise Reduction (MMX version as I recall): 12
3.Flaxen VHS filter: default settings

With Tmpgenc,
1.IVTC (flicker prioritized)
2.Double Deinterlace
3.Sharpen Edge (H:80, V:80)
4.Clip frame (to get rid of bottom line interference/CC code from VCR)

This filter setup cleans up all the red and blue horizontal fabric-like lines from a poor VCR source and fills in alot of horizontal line detail.

The results are pretty damn amazing--better than the original w/o losing noticeable detail.

*However, the Flaxen VHS filter increases my encoding times by 4x. Thus, I only use it for poor sources that are worth a good encoding.

[drgt]

A good example using Avisynth and VirtualDub with neat video filter is here https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/325830-Captured-AVI-file-too-large (skip to end).