[tgrundke]

So, along with my previous post about the AVDC converter, I have a question on cleaning up a DV stream before burning it to DVD. I have several good ole' VHS tapes that I want to convert over but I would also like to 'clean up the picture' before burning it. I've got Final Cut Express and am wondering what features in the application would be best suiting to improving image quality, audio, etc.

With that in mind - I'm also curious as to 'best practices' that are recommended for converting analgue video to DVDs and keeping image quality as good as possible, if not better.

I think this would make for a great discussion.

Thanks,
travis

[k_munic]

Originally posted by tgrundke:
…
I think this would make for a great discussion.

…

yes, you can be sure

vhs has - compared to actual standards - a very low quality. there is no processing to give the pictures any more details,which are not on the tape yet.-

in FCE you have little possiblities to enhance the pic - maybe make it a little brighter, pushing the colors etc.-

same with sound "improvements": you can "push" the sound a little - but if there is any humms&brzzl, you cannot get rid off it with FCE.

the post-production enhancenment of video is a very difficult, expensive process….- e.g. there is a sound tool, called sound soap - very tricky prg, you "sample" a "clean"piece of noise and the prg extinguishes it from the wanted sound…- afaik, in after effects you can use some photoshop filtes for "pushing" the quality - but therefore you need ae and ps

and: all that need HOURS of rendering!

what i would do: forget enhancing! you will spend hours just for converting the vhs into dv - thats enough effort

[beanbag]

The phrase "you can't polish a turd" springs to mind here, and I've been asked to do it before now.
Fact is, VHS is crap and it will stay crap. There's nothing you can do with any software that will change that.
To keep the quality as high as possible, run it in to your comp through a S-video connection, use a good-quality firewire converter and use a professional-quality VHS deck (if possible), encode to MPEG-2 and just hope for the best. Running an uncompressed edit system would make it look a little better, but not much.
The quality of your video will never be any better than the origional footage. If the origional is VHS, then...well....

[Uncle Skeleton]

it's not necessarily true that you can't do anything to improve quality. If by improve quality you mean more detail, then no you can't; garbage in, garbage out. But if you mean roughly the same level of detail while reducing the random video noise, then you might have hope. Media Cleaner is expensive and slower than slow, but its filters are almost magic at stuff like this. For some VHS (actually betamax, but same principle) transfers I ended up encoding once with Cleaner's "extreme" noise reduction and once with the temporal reduction. The latter looks absolutely fantastic, as long as there's no action going on, in which case consecutive frames are blurred together, so I use the frames from the former of my two encodes there. Tedious work, to be sure, but at least the option is there...

If you don't want to fight with Cleaner, I've also had good results from MediaPipe's temporal denoise filter, especially considering the price. It's not the most stable program though