Cleaning up picture on imported VHS footage??

[Bob Linsdell]

Please let us know how the double sampling works out.

The most significant improvement I made to my VHS captures was to use the AVT-8710 Time Base Corrector. It cost me $230US new. It reduced the video noise across the frame, reduced jitter, reduced dropped frames to zero, and improved the sharpness a little.

Example

Direct from VHS player:

Using Time Base Corrector between VHS player and PC:

After filtering Time Base corrected capture (the zoom/cropping is mostly as a result of the deshaker filter):

[Michael Lester]

When a “noisey” VHS tape comes in, I’ll try using the double, maybe triple, pass and post it here. It may be two days from now or maybe two months. Depends when one comes into the studio.
Also, I’ll take a look at the AVT-8710 Time Base Corrector to decide whether to fork out the $$$.

On another note, some of the “jitters” or “jumpiness” can be caused by a tape not being played for years. Every tape that comes in to the studio is run fastforward and rewind. Sometimes this has to be done three times to get the tape to run smooth.

When digitizing analog video tapes, I use the Canopus ADVC 300 feeding into Vegas Pro 10. With ADVC 300 a person can adjust the hue and saturation on deteriorating tape before going into Vegas Pro. Then, one can use Vegas to fine-tune color with the primary and secondary color corrector along with using the other fxs. This doesn’t work all the time because some of the tapes are so washed out and color-shifted that not a whole lot can be done; However, Canopus ADVC and Vegas Pro are a perfect combination for me when digitizing analog video. It’s like a marriage made in heaven.

By the way, I’m a retired guy with a part-time business (to stay out of my wife’s hair and remained married to her for another 40 years) that has no financial interest in Canopus and Sony.

[Dave Haynie]

I used a pretty cool TBC years ago, a plug-in for my Amiga 2000. It didn’t just provide time base correction, but you could run special effects, or just things like luma level, color adjustments, etc. So in 1994, in a weird way, I had video “plug-ins”, even though I was editing tape to tape. Trick was, the edit was automated by computer.

What a TBC does is rebuffer your video. Tape is stretchy, and successive generation of tape to tape editing will have a nasty effect on the timing of your video signals. Most digital TBCs work by digitizing your video, storing it to a frame buffer, then generating video back out again.

Thing is, a good digitizer is doing that first part anyway — resynching the video. The big difference is likely to be tolerance: a TBC is designed with the idea that crappy video is coming in; a cheap digitizer may lose its mind if the video is too far off. But in general, you don’t need TBC in front of a digitizer.

-Dave