Best Settings for Capturing VHS

[wilymo]

What are the best settings to use when capturing a VHS tape with Virtual Dub? I have an AMD 1.2 GHZ, 256mb DDR memory, and a 30 gb hd. I am using an ATI All in Wonder 32mb DDR video card. Just wanting to know people's suggestions in what settings I should use on my capture that are realistic. For instance, filters, audio and video compression, and any others that may be realistic. Thanks for any help in advance!

[UncasMS]

due to limited hdd-space i would not suggest using huffyuv but mjpeg/picvideo2 set to the max (20) instead - i would NOT directly encode to divx!

same for audio; go for uncompressed pcm/wav not mp3 to be on the safe side an not risk dropped frames.

now you'll have a huge avi and a sound stream in wave format.
this avi file should be de-interlaced using a decent de-interlacer (not the internal!!!) like 'de-interlace area based' from gunnar thalin and 'telecide 1.1' from donald graft.

in addition to de-interlacing a smoother like 'smart smoother' from graft or a de-noiser like 'dynamic noise reduction' from steven don might be useful.

[wilymo]

Where can I find the de-interlacing and smoother programs you mentioned?

Thanks

[setarip]

The items mentioned by UNcasMS are not separate programs. rather, they are plugin filters for VirtualDub which can be found at the following sites (as well as others):

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

http://www186.pair.com/vdub/virtualdub_filters.html

[techno]

Nice piece of info setarip and UnCasMS!

Techno

[divxdude]

watch out for teceliining, this can be a bitch. tecelines are when your capturing and theirs a lot of action you see the picture break up into lines, this can get annoying ive had this problem many times the only way i found to get rid of these was using the AVI2VCD program. i know their more out their, this was just the one i stumbled apon that worked.

[Draco]

Just out of curiosity, why not encode directly to Divx? I've used the VirtualDub capture mode, encoding straight to Divx and I haven't had any problems, and the video came out just fine.

Chris

[techno]

But it will not be good quality! We want very high quality.

Techno

[benderman]

It depends much on the resolution you want to use. With a hight of half the original hight (288 for PAL or 240 for NTSC) you don't have to care about deinterlacing. Than you can use nearly any codec you like (DivX-Fast/Low or MJPEG). You always should use a noise-reduction-filter because the noise "steals" a lot of the bitrate.
For higher resolutions you will need a deinterlacing-filter. For best results capture with full hight (576 or 480) with a lossless compression and recompress using a high-quality deinterlacer.

I capture in 512x576 (PAL) with noise reduction, deinterlace with Donald Grafts smart deinterlace 2.7 and resize it to 512x384. The bicubic resize filter makes the video a little smooth and so it will be more compressible with DivX.

[Draco]

I've been using Divx 3.11 Low Motion, 320x240 (I think; definitely 320xSomething), and like I said, the quality of mine has been fine. I've been trying to fit about 2 hours per 650 megs, so the video bitrate usually runs around 650-750.

Then again, most of my captures have been Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes; most of the movies they show are already pretty grainy/blurred/old. So it could be that I just haven't noticed any degredation because I haven't been encoding "typical" video. I'll find out soon; I'd like to encode a few old football games, and I'm gonna start recording CSI and Whose Line episodes too for encoding later.

Chris

[S7NNER]

welcome7

benderman: (or anyone)
i also use PAL.
IS it better to capture with the 'noise' filter? or should it be done AFTER the capture. deinterlace then apply the noise filter to it...?