Hi there,
I've been reading through forum posts for a while now trying to figure out the best way to do this, but I'm feeling overwhelmed because so much of the advice on here seems to conflict with other people's advice. So, I decided to just make my own post. At the very least, writing all this out might help me organize my own thoughts.
I'm in the process of transferring VHS tapes, VHS-C tapes, and Hi-8 tapes to digital. I'm doing all my Hi-8 tapes first, so that's what this post is dealing with. I'm using the Hauppauge USB-Live 2, with an S-Video cable, to capture and I'm using AmaRecTV with Lagarith to record to lossless avi files. Everything's good up to this point.
Now, my goal is to take these source recordings, deinterlace them, denoise them (with Neat Video for
VirtualDub), crop out the scan lines at the bottom (
VirtualDub seems to be fine for this), improve the audio quality (if possible), and compress them to mp4 files so they can be easily shared over the internet. I would like to get some of them on DVDs later too, but that's secondary to the mp4 files.
Here are my questions:
1. What order should these things be done in? Should I be saving a new version of the file after every processing stage? (As opposed to telling VirtualDub to deinterlace and denoise at the same time, for instance)
2. What's the best program for deinterlacing? I saw someone say VirtualDub's deinterlacing isn't the best, but I don't see anything wrong with it.
3. What's the best way to improve audio quality? Someone recommended Audacity, but I find it hard to work with.
4. What's the best program and settings for compression and conversion to mp4? I've tried this so many different ways and it always comes out sort of disappointing. I feel lost when it comes to selecting bitrates and such. I'll take somewhat large file sizes if it means decent quality.
