VHS to DVD capturing looking bad

[Mike777]

Hello guys!

Finally, I've decided to put all my wrestling tapes collection onto DVD using capture card but at the end of the day the resulting DVD looked bad (not that bad, but to me it looked worse than actual VHS tape).

My PC is P4-2600/512 mb ram
capture card is Pinnacle PCTV
working in PAL

since videodub looked a little bit complicated to me I decided to use Pinnacle Studio 8 for capturing and captured about 45 minutes of video from VHS at 8 Mbps rate. Then I've made a DVD from this videofile but after viewing it once I thought the end result will not appeal to me, hard to explain but colours/intensity of picture weren't pleasing at all, when compared to original VHS recording (it was a master tape, not a tv recording), even that there was way to change brightness etc in Pinnacle Studio 8 this tweaking did nothing to improve end result for me.

I did expect better looking results capturing at 8 Mbps and from excellent quality original tape.

Any ideas why could it be so? Or my choice of program (using easy program instead of more complicated one) is wrong? Maybe I need to apply some filters?

Regards,

Mike

[Arachnotron]

There are many, many possibilities. To name but a few:

First, do consider splitting up capturing and generating the final MPEG2 file. On the fly mpg2 compression simply cannot offer the quality you can get from a well tweaked multi-pass compression, and makes it difficult to trace back where something went wrong. VirtualVCR and programs like it are not that complicated, and many guides on capturing are floating around on the net.

second, if possible use s-video instead of composite leads. Makes a lot of difference. Of course, you need a VCR with a s-video out for this.

third, tweak brightness and contrast using a color histogram. see http://www.lukesvideo.com/videotuning.html for an example.

Vdub and virtualVCR both offer this function, though the one in virtualVCR only works at 352x288, RGB24. This does not matter: once you know the correct settings, you can write them down and use them at the resolution/colorspace you really want to capture at.

And last but not leas: read the Doom9 capture guide!!
http://www.doom9.org/capture/start.html