"crop" to get rid of "video noise at bottom o

[Dean]

I have VS8. Please refer to an old message at
http://www.globalmediapro.com/av/messages/175404.html
which dicusses using "cropping". How can VS8 provide this function?
Has anybody ever had easy-success utilizing a Time Base Corrector to avoid the need to crop?

[sjj1805]

The video noise is no doubt due to your VHS Tapes suffering either tracking problems, or just plain old old and worn. You could firstly try a tape head cleaner in your video player to see if this helps.

If you cannot get rid of the noise bars at the bottom of the screen there are a couple of things you can do.

1. On the overlay track, place a black colour clip and make it the entire length of your video, size and place it so that is hides the noise bars, you will get a similar result to that when you watch a wide screen film on a 4.3 TV.

2. Place the Video on the overlay track, Stretch it so that it extends below the display area to again hide the noise bars. You can either just make your picture "taller", or you can keep the aspect ratio - though you would also lose some of the width. It depends on what your picture looks like when choosing which method would be best for your circumstances.

[THoff]

There is no guarrantee that a TBC will remove overscan artifacts during an analog capture. Chances are that if you want a completely clean capture, you'll have to do some cropping. I have a Canopus ADVC-300 that I use for analog captures -- it reduces, but does not eliminate the overscan artifacts. How severe they are will depend largely on your source (the material itself and the device).

The good news is that the area being cropped isn't normally visible on TVs anyway. I would crop, and then not resize the image, but color-fill the cropped area with a black background. This avoids the processor-intensive resize with resulting image degradation to fill an area that once again won't be visible on a TV. Filling the area with black will allow the video to play properly on digital display such as computer monitors.

[TubaDad]

Another option, instead of having to place your video on the overlay track, because you can't to transitions there, you can use the cropping filter to clip the top and bottom of the frame. When using this filter remember to set it at the beginning and end of the clip, otherwise the cropping will change throughout the range of the clip.