recording from VHS to DVD, can virtualdub help?

[Glen_S]

I am converting a couple of tapes for a friend to dvd, these are done with rented camcorders in the early 90's, I have no idea what he used. On one disc I made going from VHS direct to dvd recorder the quality is what one would expect (poor), but the dvd copy I made on my panasonic DMR-ES16 is a carbon copy of the tape, which is all he wanted.

However, the other tape is another question, when I hook up direct to the TV there is some noise across the bottom of the screen that won't go away, but I'll live with that. The problem is when I go through the dvd recorder, the picture flickers badly, almost like the old v-hold on old tv's, I see 1/2 screen split in two, with all the noise now in the middle of the screen and it's basically unwatcheable. I changed VCR's to no avail.

So I hooked it up to my ATI AIW card thinking that maybe I could at least record it to avi and convert it to dvd, but the same horrible flickering effect shows up from the capture card with the ati software.

Will virtualdub help clean this up? Anything else? Or is this a lost cause?

As you can see, I am pretty new at this..

thanks!

[moonrocks]

If you have a very poor quality VHS tape that displays obvious distortion when going straight from VHS to your TV then that video can sometimes come out looking much worse after being fed to a digital device like a DVD Recorder or PC capture card. Those capture devices have limited abilities for coping with bad analog input.

Don't try to clean up the bad digital capture after the fact. Try to improve the signal before it hits your capture device.

I'd first play the VHS tape to a TV and adjust the tracking control on the VCR for the best possible picture. Then try to capture the tape. If that doesn't help I'd try putting an external TBC (Time Based Corrector) between the VCR and your capture device.