VHS capture quality - cartoons

[rkelleyrtp]

Greetings all,

I have been trying to get good captures of my son's cartoon VHS tapes (*brand new* Disney tapes) and have been sadly disappointed. Here is my setup:

JVC HiFi VCR <--composite_video--> DAC-100 <--firewire--> PC

My homebuilt PC has an AMD FX-53, 1GB RAM, 2x120GB HDDs. I am using Scenalyzer to capture the video.

The problem is the video looks grainy during the capture process. These tapes (brand new) look OK when played on the TV. But, going through the DAC-100 to my PC produces the "mosquito" effect and the picture appears to be grainy. I have tried 2 VCRs - same problem. If I try to convert the resulting AVI file to MPEG (tmpgenc - DVD output), the quality worsens.

Like most folks, I have done my fair share of reading the articles and info on the forums. But, I have hit an impass. I understand the VHS quality won't be very good (compared to DVD), but I would like it as close to the VHS source as possible.

I have been considering getting a VHS deck with S-Video out (instead of composite) but am unsure if that will fix the problem.

Any advice/help?

-Ron

[tsp]

The reason it doesn't look grainy on the TV is that the TV sort of blurs the picture compared to you monitor. I would guess if you burned the capture to DVD and played it back on the TV you wouldn't notice it. But if you want to get rid of the grains I would suggest processing the movie in avisynth with a filter called removegrain, degrainmedian, medianblur or a similair filter.
If you brought a high-end S-VHS video it would probably remove some of grains. Not because it's a S-VHS video but because it has a build-in filter (like Digipure. That's what my JVC HR-S 7960 S-VHS video has and it does degrain the picture.) but I think you can get the same result using avisynth. But if you only want's to see the cartoons on the TV it may not be worth it (unless it's HD-TV :) )