Need help cleaning up Analog Cap? Please?!?

[Aris_Boch]

I have digital cable, but unfortunately only the premium channels are digital. The rest are in analog, which is very noisy. Lots of graininess in the capture, like capping from VHS.

I've tried using the software MMC7.1 which came with my card, actually the download of the lastest drivers and software. Capture S-Video in MPEG1, Custom settings are 6Mbps CBR, 352x240, NTSC 525 video with the highest motion estimate setting and 44.1KHz 16Bit Stereo. This gives me a very good cap of the original. (Tried VBR but it caused problems in TMPGenc when trying to cut out commercials, etc...) The problem is the source, being analog, is still very grainy. Obviously resulting in a grainy cap.

I usually encode XVCD (my standalone DVD player won't play SVCD), 2 Pass VBR max 2520, average 2200 and 1800 min, Full Screen Keep Aspect Ratio, Motion Search High Quality. This results in an excellent XVCD for the digital captures, but I'm have fits trying to find a way to clean up the analog ones.

I've tried various combinations of the TMPGenc Filters with poor results. I've also tried using VirtualDub and Huffy for capping, which results in a cap of equal quality to the MMC software.

To clean it up, I've tried numerous methods of filtering in VDub and then converting from AVI to MPEG1 in TMPGenc, encoding in TMPGenc only and combinations of the two.

No matter what I do, I either get rid of the speckles and graininess only to find the picture is too smooth or I get shimmering in the background, or other artifacts. I have literally tried dozens of combinations and with a fast PC, even 1 hour caps with multiple filters which take up to 20 hours to encode, still result in poor results. Seems no matter what I do, I get rid of one problem and introduce another.

There has got to be someone who has figured out which filters to use for this along with the correct order and settings, but I can't locate much info in the guides and I'm going blind reading hundreds of posts trying to find clues... (But I do appreciate everyone's guides and posts! They have proved helpful in many other ways...)

So if someone has found anything which works well for you, please help! This hobby is turning into a nightmare.

Actually, I wouldn't mind so much if SG-1 and Enterprise were on the digital stations. But I would like to also move some VHS eventually if I can find a way to do this...

Thanks in advance for any help you can give...
(Equipment info listed in Computer Details)

[CryptKeeper]

I've done lots of VHS > MPEG2 > DIVX AVI encodes
and mine come out very nice


which capture card have you got?

Mine is an ATI AIW 128 tv in/out

and I've also got analog not digital

[CryptKeeper]

DOH!!!.....didn't see that you supplied the computer details

I've tried the capturing with that MMC7.1
and all I can say is PHOOEY!!

for My capturing I went back to WIN98 SE
since I can set the fps of the capture and not stay limited to ntsc 29.97fps
and pal 25fps

and within WINXP it would also drop frames

so in win98se using the ati 6.3 tv
these are the settings I use to capture VHS tapes to mpeg 1

NTSC
352x240 res
25fps
Audio = 128K 44100hz
bitrate = closest to 1150000 as I can get

for 1hr of encoding it yields about a 1gig mpeg
with nice results

and if I want to encode to mpeg2
then I encode using these settings
NTSC
352x240 res
25fps
Audio = 128K 44100hz
bitrate = closest to 2520000 as I can get

which yields about a 2gig mpeg
still nice results

and if I want to encode and then reconvert to divx avi
(sbc encoding using Gknot and Nandub)
still using MPEG-2
I change the bitrate to 4million or higher
according to how nice of an image I want

[zzyzzx]

1. Capture at a higher resoultion (if you can) and let TMPEGnc do the shrinking. You'll get much better picture quality.

2. Use the "dynamic noise reduction" option in Virtualdub to do your noise reduction (however, capturing with Virtualdub is not recommended). It does noise reduction much faster then TMPEGnc.

SO basically I capture at 480x480 using MJPEG Picvideo codec and VidCap, then run it through VirtualDub to get the noise reduction and trim. Then I encode using TMPEGnc and don't use the noise reduction in TMPEGnc, it goes way too slow. Understand?

[Aris_Boch]

Thank you! I'll give your suggestions a try tonight!