How can I improve these VHS animation captures?
 

So for the last decade or so it has been my mission to get high quality versions of all 100 episodes of this anime series. Sadly only the first 36 or so episodes were released on DVD, and the rest were rental VHS only. @_@

I managed to get all the VHS, and then sent them off to someone to digitize them. (Not a professional service, just another fan who wanted to help out) He had to give me partly compressed avi files back and did minimal filtering. This was a looong time ago, 10 years at least.

Here are a few examples of the final VHS videos after I deinterlaced and tweaked them a tiny bit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaNQL-JbkyM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUFL3bIBCsE

And here's one of the DVD captures for comparison! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUQIivyvdcI

What would be the best way to sharpen the image and get rid of artifacting? Some tapes are worse than others, but generally they look similar.

I even got a nice new VCR and capture device so I can try to re-digitize from scratch instead of working from compressed files already if that would help.

Thank you for any advice!

Those already look really good.
- IVTC deinterlace looks fine
- no timebase / wiggle errors
- no chroma noise
- almost no chroma offset
- no top-frame chroma or timebase issues
- decent color, maybe too much contrast at worst (too bright lights, black darks)

To run the risk of easily adding more artifacts by trying to sharpen -- especially halo/ringing and mosquito noise.

Honestly, the only thing that betrays it as "not digital source" is the over-contrast. I see worse HD quality on official network sites.

I started this hobby as a toon collector. Not really into anime, but it's an acquired taste. I didn't realize the Kirby was non-USA first, but probably should have guessed it (Nintendo, duh!). Never really watched it when on Fox Box. It was either right before or after TMNT 2003, which I did watch.

Ah well that's good to hear :D


Good thing you bring up the saturation issue, that's one thing I nearly forgot.

What would be the best way to fix that? To use a filter, or just re-capture?

It's not really a saturation issues, not entirely, but a black/white crushing issue. I would test a re-capture of an episode against the mere color tweaking of one. None of the values look to wonky, not unsalvageable.

I'm guessing these are Japanese NTSC-J 0 IRE tapes, which may account for some of that. Playing an Japanese tape in North American NTSC equipment has that effect. Or perhaps fansubbed with NTSC-J at some point.

You need to calibrate your monitor, and use an IPS non-shiny monitor, before attempting any color correction. It looks to have been corrected on a bad monitor, maybe.

It's all workable. Better than usual fansub VHS, that's for sure.