Filter for saturation fluctuations from VHS capture?

[greenphantom]

I'm hoping someone can help me... I've been capturing some old VHS home videos with an ADS DVD Xpress capture device. Some of the captures have an annoying feature - the colour saturation fluctuates occasionally, giving a sort of flickering effect. Does anyone know of a virtualdub filter that would address this problem? Thanks in advance!

[vhelp]

Hi greenphantom

(there's been talk that the Xpress is MV 'less, but it is not. it suffer from MV)

What you are seeing is a macrovision effect.. where the color's
fade from color to b/w. This is one aspect of MV.. though their
are plenty of others.

I know, because I have the Xpress also, and this is what it does on
commerical vhs movies.

-vhelp

[greenphantom]

Thanks for the reply, though it's occuring on old personal VHS tapes that I made with my video camera. It only happens on some of them... I figured they were breaking down a bit because of their age. At any rate, is there a way to lessen the effect using a vdub filter? :confused:

[mic]

I did a quick bit of googling on your hardware, & according to article at Tom's Hardware, box does hardware mpg2 encodes, & higher quality setting (bitrate = ~9) is suggested FWIW.

If you are doing mpg2 captures, to edit the video in V/Dub you'll have to do a conversion and ultimately re-encode to mpg2. While this is no big deal, If your original has a bitrate of 9, you are going to take a quality hit at the least from the re-encode.

If your problem with captured video is as vhelp posts, particularly loss of saturation to B/W, I'd suggest an external device to enhance/improve the video signal between your vcr & capture box.

If OTOH your problem is different, say perhaps an increase in saturation etc., read the guides and posts re: getting your video into V/Dub, capture a still of a frame or two displaying the prob, & there's plenty of folks here who won't mind giving a look &/or opinion.

[greenphantom]

Thanks mic. I used a program called DGIndex to split the mpeg file into video and audio, and then I had no trouble editing the video in VirtualDubMod. In terms of bitrate, I don't think a higher bitrate will help much since since the problem is on the source videotape. The file I'm working with at the moment was something I recorded from television long ago and I wanted to store it in XviD format on my hard drive. Since this problem may crop up on other old video tapes as well (I'm capturing a lot of home movies right now) I was hoping an existing VirtualDub filter might help smooth out the fluctuations in saturation somehow. Perhaps I'll post a few frames here later as you suggest... Thanks again for the help!