VHS to DVD, just how good a quality am I going to be able to get?

[Mike89]

I recently started converting some educational VHS tapes to DVD on my computer.

I am using the Leadtek TV2000XP TV tuner card for video capture and Nero Vision Express for the software.

I've made a few DVD's already but I notice that when the people move, there is a blur at the edges of their arms, legs, etc. The VHS tapes aren't the greatest quality but playing them sure doesn't produce these effects.

What's causing this? Would a better capture card, like the Hauppage 150 for example, fix this problem?

[Mug Funky]

sounds like it's been (badly) deinterlaced.

if there's settings for it in your capture software, try to maintain interlace all through the capture and encoding process. motion will be smoother this way, and noise will be less obvious (because it's on the screen for half the time and cancels out nicely in the brain).

if you want really good quality it might also be worth finding a VCR with a time-base corrector (TBC) in it. this will help defeat the evil horizontal wibblies that are ubiquitous with VHS.

[Mike89]

I don't see any setting regarding interlace. It's just resolution and color settings.

[blabah]

1. The Nero is a bad choise (up to Ver6.6). Try a "OEM" Ulead DVD Workshop2SE or WinProducer or... (not Pinnacle Studio).
2. The best "capture card" is a standalone DVD Recorder!!!

[setarip_old]

there is a blur at the edges of their arms, legs, etc.
You could use the "Ghost Reduction" filter in "TMPGEnc" (Different than "TMPGEnc DVD Author") to mitigate this...

[jggimi]

@blabah - Welcome to the forum. Please note: no one asked what's best. Its divisive, since we have more than 85,000 members with more than 85,000 opinions. See Rule #12 (http://forum.doom9.org/forum-rules.htm).

[kis2005]

Mike89, I have converted some of my old VHS tapes that were probably just as good as the ones your using and what has worked for me was an external USB device that captured and convrted to MPEG format (ADS DVD Express). With that I used TMPGEnc DVD Author 1.6. I'm not saying this is the only way, but I did get good results with the combo. Just make sure to use the highest quality settings. The ADS wan't more then $70 US and DVD Author has a trial download.

[jpeshek]

I got the same results when I captured using Nero through a Theater550 card, and when I used a different program that allowed me to keep the footage interlaced, all went away. The Hauppage is a hardware mpeg encoding card, like my Theater550, and although it will reduce the strain on your CPU, it is arguable whether the quality would be any better. The software you are using is probably more important for what you are trying to do, and if you want to do any serious editing after capture and before burning, my best results (without spending wads of cash) came from using a digital camcorder as a pass through device and capturing DV-AVI format.

[MoonDoggie]

Having done similar recordings of VHS tapes, I ended up getting the best results using a Canopus ADVC-100. It’s an external a/v pass-through to firewire box, so I could hook my VCR up to it with the standard composite (RCA) cables and capture the video to the hd as DV video. I could then edit it as I wanted and convert it to mpeg2 with CCE 2.5. Needless to say I was very happy with the results. I bought the advc-100 for $125 but from what I understand Canopus has discontinued it and has replaced it with the advc-110 and I have no experience with it, so I can’t say for sure if it’s as good or better.

I should also mention that I now have a VCR with s-video output and that has improved the quality a lot. But that only makes sense seeing as how s-video has a higher number of line resolution.

Just my 2cents
Moondoggie

[dosdan]

Mike89, is the edge bluring only on the PC (a PC monitor is progressive) or when watching on a TV (usually interlaced)?

[theReal]

Before you buy new capture hardware I'd consider buying a good DVD recorder to save you time and hassles (unless you want sophisticated menus).
I just got a Pioneer DVR 433H and I am amazed at how good it encodes old VHS to MPEG2, even at around 5Mbit/s you can hardly see a difference to the original VHS (at least on a normal tv set). Maybe you can try it somewhere and see if you like it - you'd save a lot of time because it's real-time with no further capture or encode problems.

[Mug Funky]

i second the DVD recorder thing... especially for NTSC where using DV as a passthrough will halve your chroma resolution, which you probably don't want, even for VHS. for PAL DV is perfectly okay though - it samples differently in PAL. i played around with a pioneer DVR 330s (basic model - no hard disk, but DL burning is good) and the encode quality was disturbingly good - if it had a 2-pass mode and came on a PCI card w/ SDI input it would be better than the MPX3000 cards i use at work, but at a much lower cost.

Canopus has discontinued it and has replaced it with the advc-110 and I have no experience with it, so I can’t say for sure if it’s as good or better.

it's pretty good. i haven't used the 100, but the 110 works nicely. only problem is it has a nasty way of keeping audio in time with video on stretched VHS tapes - it inserts blank samples, causing sometimes horrible clicking noise.

[WoozleWuzzle]

Hmm, I just bought a Leadtek DV2000 for mainly this purpose, but having spent some time tinkering, and then read this post, very tempted to go and purchase a DVD recorder :(

[mg262]

i played around with a pioneer DVR 330s (basic model - no hard disk, but DL burning is good) and the encode quality was disturbingly good!!Do you mean the underlying capture (ADC) is really good i.e. sharper and less noisy than the card (or than capture cards in general)? Or just that the real-time MPEG 2 encoding is better than the card?

[ronnylov]

I have tested the latest version of Mainconcept PVR and was surprised of how good quality I could capture directly to MPEG-2 and it has a built in DVD-authoring function which makes it quie easy to do. There is a 30 day trial version you can try before buy. It have mainconcept encoder integrated (but only for realtime capturing I beleive) and you can capture and encode as interlaced which looks good on TV. But this requires a fast CPU to be able to encode with high quality settings. I could not maximize the quality settings even with my dual core AMD64 X2 running at 2400 MHz (but I could increase the quality slider from default 20 up to 46). But when encoding from VHS you can probably reduce the resolution to half D1 (352x576 PAL or 352x480 NTSC) and get pretty good results also on a slow PC.

Otherwise you can try VirtualVCR and capture to huffyuv avi and then afterwards encode to MPEG-2 and author to DVD. See the really nice capture guide here on doom9.

You can not expect any better quality than your original video. But you should expect almost the same quality. Maybe the bitrate was too low? 6 mbit/s video bitrate is fine for full resolution and 3-4 mbit/s should work at half resolution.

[Mug Funky]

!!Do you mean the underlying capture (ADC) is really good i.e. sharper and less noisy than the card (or than capture cards in general)? Or just that the real-time MPEG 2 encoding is better than the card?

the ADC is good (pretty nice comb filter... looks better watching TV through that than with the TV's internal tuner, and it's a nice TV), and the encode quality is also very nice. obviously no 2-pass ratecontrol or anything though. seems to only use MPEG standard matrix, but that's fine (i've heard of some encoders that dynamically change matrices).

[edit]

i haven't done any objective tests on this obviously, just capped the one NTSC tape, but it looked better than some NTSC stuff i've done with an ADVC 110. there's too many variables to be able to make an objective decision though... but consider the space saving between 9.8mbps max and 25mbps constant...

[mg262]

You made me think that the best-quality analogue capture method available might be to use one of these things at max qual., rip it, filter in AVISynth, and re-encode. (At the moment I use capture card -- which needs replacing cause it's rubbish -- with HuffYUV. I have a relatively small amount of old VHS stuff to capture, so I don't care about space... but most of it is impossible to reobtain, so I care a lot about quality.)

Edit: I use a S-Video connection, so it gets round the comb filter thing. At least, I assume the VCR is built sensibly enough that this is the case.

[bkorn]

I have captured VHS to DVD-R using a panasonic DVD Recorder (model DMR-ES20S). I cannot see any difference in quality comparing the source to the dub. However, I cannot play any of the DVDs I made on a PC (I've tried it on 6 different machines) even though they will play flawlessly on desktop DVD players.

I will probably return the machine this weekend.

Bruce

[johnsonlam]

I recently started converting some educational VHS tapes to DVD on my computer.


I'm doing almost the same things, the different is I convert some old TV drama, so I got a little experience on this.


I am using the Leadtek TV2000XP TV tuner card for video capture and Nero Vision Express for the software.


I've once consider Leadtek TV2000XP, but soon I found it's quality is OK but not very good, best for realtime TV capture only. If your VHS material is very precious, you should consider a better card.

Due to budget limitation, I choose Canopus ADVC-1394 (now replaced by ADVC300).


I've made a few DVD's already but I notice that when the people move, there is a blur at the edges of their arms, legs, etc. The VHS tapes aren't the greatest quality but playing them sure doesn't produce these effects.


Don't know how Leadtek handle the captured video, but guess the bad quality may cause by the capture codec transcoding and the card without fine-tune.

My ADVC-1394 have a control panel, can change the sharpness, color, brightness and contrast, maybe your card have similar option, try tuning to best quality first.


What's causing this? Would a better capture card, like the Hauppage 150 for example, fix this problem?

To keep the capture high quality, I suggest 'HuffYUV' codec for real time capture because it's loseless, then you need VirtualDub or AVISynth to de-interlace (I think DVD no need to de-interlace, but I like XviD more than DVD), filter the noise, change brightness/contrast ... etc, then the final product can be encode to DVD with Nero or XviD/DivX.

If you're running out of time or feeling too trouble, buy a DVD recorder and record from VHS directly, the result not too bad.

[Chainmax]

You can get pretty decent quality, but it depends on the source's condition and wether it's live action or animated content. I'd recommend the Compro Videomate X800 (http://www.comprousa.com/New/en/product/X800.html) capture card, some form of TBC (be it a PCI card or included on your VCR) and a VCR with S-Video output.