Video quality settings in VS

[VinnyC]

I transferred some VHS tapes to DVD in VS 10+. They looked very good on my older 26" TV. We recently purchased a 42" flat screen HD and a Bluray DVD player that upconverts DVD to near HD. When I played my DVDs that I converted from VHS the video quality is decreased. I burned the VHS tapes to DVD format, 29.97 rate, 7000 bitrate constant 720x480. What is the better format to transfer VHS to DVD? Thanks!

[canuck]

You cannot really get better quality then what you have. VHS is "low quality" compared to HD and when you "upconvert" you do not improve the quality. In fact any "imperfections" in the original video are magnified and you get lower quality.
What setting did you use when you captured the video from the VHS device?

What does the DVD video look like when you don't use the "upconvert" function?

[Ken Berry]

And of course, the significant increase in screen size also makes any imperfections in the DVD that much larger, quite apart from the up-converting effect mentioned by cancuck. And while your DVD may have looked very good on your original set-up, you can't really compare it to studio-made DVDs of commercial movies. Those are produced using very sophisticated systems and multi-pass conversion which ensures the best quality output. VS offers at most two-pass conversions.

Sadly, I have had the same experience as you, and indeed my early "masterpieces" look even worse on a 46 inch HDTV and up-converted by my PlayStation 3 (which is an excellent Blu-Ray/DVD player). So these days I content myself by using a 32 inch HDTV to look at the old ones...

[VinnyC]

canuck-I used the settings 7000 constant bitrate, 29.97 frames/sec. 720x480 res DVD format. The VHS movie was digitally remastered and was DVD quality. It did look much better on my 26" TV.

Ken-thanks. I thought it was something I did wrong. Is there any way to improve the quality?

[Ken Berry]

Is there any way to improve the quality?

Well, if anyone has found a way, I too would be interested. In the meantime, the only way I have found -- at least for my in-country videos -- is to revisit the areas I filmed and do it all over again, but with a high def camcorder!! But that of course doesn't cover all those many things I filmed which were one of a kind or in other countries or otherwise not readily accessible again...