Jitter Reduction

[Bardez]

I took a few minutes to do a quick search and came up with no decent results, so here's one for you guys...

I'm taking an old VHS tape that was recorded from a camcorder for years since 1989 -- my grandmother recorded all sorts of things that we the grandkids did, and I want to make a DVD out of it for my cousins and myself.

The problem that I'm running into is that aside from the hand-held motion, a LOT of jitter is coming out of my capture. It's so bad that none of my various cap cards (3 in different PCs) can handle both sets of scan lines, so I decided to just roll with what I'm given and cap only one set of scan lines. The problem is that the tape is so old / bad that while it plays fine on TVs (more or less), the jumping of scan lines up and down (on only one set) is terrible, leaving behind an awfully noticable jitter.

I was wondering in anyone knows of any filters (preferably AVISynth, but anything else if you guys have anything) that can help me -- I'm not interrested in retaining ALL scanlines since I'll have to end up cropping in the end anyway, if that helps.

[Mug Funky]

what sort of jitter are we talking about? horizontal or vertical?

either way, a TBC (time base corrector) is your best bet. plus a VCR with good, manually adjustible tracking (that'll help greatly).

i assume this footage is important to you, so you might even consider paying a duplication house to transfer it for you (to whatever format you can best handle, DVD, DV, etc). they'll have the necessary equipment.

or you could track down one of those JVC VCRs with the built in TBC and do it yourself. perhaps suss out which is less cost or hassle.

i say this because once that video is digitised, time base errors are impossible to remove as well as an analog TBC could (clouded made a very good attempt, but jitter was still present and the script/plugins weren't made available. i imagine it'd be dog slow too).

[Bardez]

Well it's vertical jitter, not horizontal (sorry, thought I remembered to specify everything), and I was hoping not to need new equipment. I'll try running it through a signal cleaner to see if that might help, but something tells me that won't work too well.

As for paying someone else to do it, I'm a little too proud to go that direction just yet.