Improving a VHS tape transfer

[Berzelius]

I have a family wedding on a 10 year old VHS tape that I have copied to a DVD using my DVD recorder. The quality is pretty flakey; specifically, the vertical hold is poor so that it judders up and down and there is a line of noise (a few percent of the screen height) along the bottom of the screen.

Now I realise that I may be asking the impossible, but is there anything in VideoStudio 11 that would enable me to improve the quality of the DVD?

Alternatively, any tips on improving the VHS tape itself?

[Ron P.]

A video re-produced is not going to be higher or better quality than the source. "You can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear" can you?

You can try applying a noise filter, or enhancing the sharpness, contrast, but it still is not going to produce a better quality video.

Does your VHS tape show blocks or pixelating? If so that is magnetic drop-off, which means that the data that was on the tape has fallen off, and can never be replaced, it's just gone. That is a pitfall of magnetic tape. It will degenerate over time, loosing it's magnetic properties, which in turn drops the quality of the video.

[Black Lab]

A video re-produced is not going to be higher or better quality than the source. "You can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear" can you?

It may be my imagination, but when I take one of my old VHS tapes and run it thru my Sony camcorrder to get it into my pc, I swear the quality is slightly improved. Seems a bit sharper, colors a bit brighter. But it surely won't perform miracles.

[Berzelius]

A video re-produced is not going to be higher or better quality than the source. "You can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear" can you?

You can try applying a noise filter, or enhancing the sharpness, contrast, but it still is not going to produce a better quality video.

Does your VHS tape show blocks or pixelating? If so that is magnetic drop-off, which means that the data that was on the tape has fallen off, and can never be replaced, it's just gone. That is a pitfall of magnetic tape. It will degenerate over time, loosing it's magnetic properties, which in turn drops the quality of the video.

I take your point. I was vaguely thinking of what you suggest, that is using some of the Effects.

I've actually been playing around with Effects to see what happens, but this would seem likely to produce an unacceptable increase in the time for burning the DVD. I took a 1 minute excerpt for test purposes and applied antishake, antinoise and cropping filters (the latter to remove the band of noise at the bottom). However after a few minutes it seemed that, very roughly, the 1 minute clip would take about an hour to process. As the whole thing is about 90 minutes long . . .

I presume that the Effect filters have an awful lot of work to do. I may try just using crop.

[Black Lab]

Yes, the more effects you apply, the longer the rendering will take. Why not start the rendering process before you go to bed? You don't have to sit there and watch the paint dry, er, the rendering process, do you?