Hi. I thought I'd give my $0.02 worth to this forum for anyone who's interested in how they might want to improve on the quality of an analog capture from VHS. I'm wondering if someone out there would like to establish this message as a running commentary on what they think they can do to enhance (but not over-enhance) the image that comes from VHS. The instructions below DO NOT relate to the RGB Filtering settings that are contained with VirtualDub (as these always chew up CPU time that can affect lower-grade PCs like the <500mhz machines etc) - this instruction manual only utilises the setting which comes as standard for VirtualDub and does not affect the CPU's processing time in any way.

btw, these tips are assuming that you are running the cheapest capturing device known to PCs - the TV Capture Card (also known as TV Excel or Pixelview), I don't know how this will affect any higher-grade video capturing devices. Also, I am running VirtualDub with HuffYUV (although the MJPEG codec works just as equally here) through the said TV card above in the PAL TV format (which works the same with NTSC 23.97 or 29.97 fps) and encoding with TMPGEnc for eventual (S)VCD archiving - (this segment does not cover any improved DivX visual enhanced encoding since I can't find any settings for any DivX video quality improvements - yet!)

The two words you should always be remembering when utilising VirtualDub for your capture software is "Noise Reduction". I cannot stress how much this improves on the visual quality of a said VHS capture, although too much use of this "enhancement" ends up destroying whatever reduction of noise that you're aiming to achieve.

After going to File->Capture AVI, go to the Video->Noise Reduction->Threshold setting and bring the cursor to the far left of the bar - then step across to the right NO MORE THAN 9 TIMES - even going to 10 or above will result in a weird repeating effect of the image which is totally unwanted and ultimately redundant for the purpose of this setting. Once this is done you then exit that window and actually go back to the same setting of Video->Noise Reduction and press on "Enable" to make it actually happen (annoying but necessary). Then you can capture your video (this works for Laserdisc captures too, even though you might think that LD is perfect, think again).

If you don't believe me about the improved visual quality, do a test run with and without this setting - you should notice a marked improvement, especially when it comes to the flickering of the image which then becomes almost stable in colour and brightness when utilising the NR setting - at least it's a lot more stable than when you DON'T use this enhancement.

Afterwards, when using TMPGEnc to encode this .avi file to a VCD, I prefer to utilise the other internal "Noise Reduction" setting within TMPGEnc at a value of 20,1,20 (there relate to the three bars within this window, just set each one to the values I just stated). This tends to get rid of the finer artifacts that comes from the capturing, and although it may appear a little more blurred than the original capture, it more than makes up for this shortfall in the improved "stability" of the video image throughout the encoding - just fiddle around with these handy settings until you find the ones that suit your particular VHS capture files (and move around the various parts of these captures, they will exhibit slightly different artifactings).

Anyway, just test the difference with and without these enhancements (just make sure you don't go past the 9 mark in the VirtualDub Noise Reduction setting) and see what a difference it makes in your video captures!