VHS captured-help with software to split, remove noise, convert to H.264.

[Amanjm]

I captured 90 VHS tapes now and plan to convert them to H.264 with little correction work.

I'd like to split the videos by scenes as identified by fades when the video was taken. I once used Vegas to capture video and it did this automatically, but I learned that flow was flawed so I have now captured using a high quality VHS player, TBC, and Virtualdub HuffYUV as an avi.

Is there an automatic way to split the videos? I have read you can set a split at a certain time (e.g. 20 min), but that will not be natural enough.

I'd like to color correct, but worry about the time commitment. Do I need to do each scene separately given parts of the captured VHS video are likely different? Any software the decently does this automatically?

Can I use Adobe Premier to remove noise at bottom of screen or do I need to use Virtualdub to do it right?

Can I use Adobe Media Encoder to encoded the video to H.264 and still expect quality results? I figure I can encode these all with only one month of subscription. Or I can use an encoder from Vegas and expect quality? I am not sure if there are differences in how these encode?

What settings should I use to encode? These are NTSC captured in 720x480 huffyuv 32bit using virtualdub.

Thanks.

[dpalomaki]

DaVinci Resolve’s Scene Cut Detection function might work. I believe it produces a cuts list that can be exported for use in other NLEs. However, I've not tried it. In general automatic scene detection that is not based on tape metadata read during capture, such as time code, gives mixed results.

Most NLEs will allow you to mask or crop edges. Cropping may require the image be rescaled which can hurt quality.

H.264 encode setting will depend on the intended purpose/use of the produced file. Many users like HandBrake, a freeware product under the GNU license process, that can do batch processing. There are a lot of other products available as well so ther is no need to rent from Adobe.

I've read that Adobe LightRoom can be tricked into doing automatic white balance on video, possibly frame-by-frame, but have not tried it. FWIW: I've found LightRoom's auto white balance works reasonably well as a quick and dirty correction on many (but not all) stills. However, quality video restoration, color correction, editing, stabilization, etc. take time.