Home Video VHS archive and restore with VirtualDub and AviSynth
 

Hello Everyone,

I'm working to digitally archive VHS tapes from my mother's home video collection, and also to encode them as smaller clips for viewing on my TV from my NAS, as well as sharing with family members, most likely on YouTube.

I've been on/off with this project over the last few years, doing various amounts of research each time. Now with the corona situation I find myself with some more time and at home a lot, so I'm really diving in. I have a VCR (not a good one, no TBC), and a USB capture device (VC500, shows up as Conexant CxPolaris in VirtualDub). I've captured a few tapes using VirtualDub and a lossless compression (HuffYUV). I thought I would get all the capture out of the way before spending more time researching and learning filters and AviSynth, but as I read on to validate my process for my initial lossless capture, I realized that I may need to start off with better equipment.

So my first question is, what can I post from some of my lossless captures, to get the DigitalFAQ expert consensus on whether I need to upgrade my VCR, capture card, or both? Is there some sort of specific type of scenes with certain subject matter that would help?

I'm figuring things out with VirtualDub filters and AviSynth scripts. I have things setup so far where I can deinterlace (but should I??) with QTGMC, crop and add borders, and use some other plugins within AviSynth, and I've spent a lot of time reading through this thread and experimenting with the process posted by sanlyn in post #20: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...html#post56660 (what a quality post!)

I had a hard time seeing much differences with the various plugins/filters from the original capture, so that is why I am here to find out if maybe my capture isn't all that bad (perhaps just really poorly originally recorded material), and if much would be gained by upgrading equipment vs. just continuing on capturing for now.

Thanks for your time and help.

/Jon

If you've got $3.50 to spare and are comfortable receiving things in the mail at this time, you could buy Men in Black II so that we can compare the results of different workflows: eBay search

I also previously captured Spider-Man using many different VCRs, but it was a Canadian copy that looks worse than the US one in at least 2 scenes.

Otherwise, a few short clips of your tapes of varying scene types. Like:

• brightly-lit outdoors
• dimly-lit indoors
• medium-paced action
• very-still scenery, etc.