Thank you. I'm going to have a trial run with the procamp settings tomorrow. I guessing that when I'm experimenting with the procamp I will better understand how to remove the black borders.

My histogram guide was written using my IOData GV-USB2. For the 710USB, the brightness still controls the left edge of the histogram, but the contrast expands and contracts both edges, not just the right edge. So you effectively are expanding the histogram to fit with the Contrast, then moving the whole thing left and right with the Brightness.

Re the cropping, my understanding is that it is only to get rid of the black edges while you are setting the levels (the black edges might affect the overall brightness). You don't need to set the crop to the correct aspect ratio. Once you've got your levels set, you should clear all the crops to do the actual capture.

Thank you for explaining the concept, it makes sense. I'm going to try and adjust the contrast and brightness on the procamp today and see if I can get a feel for what I should be doing. The advice yourself and lollo2 have given me regarding the procamp has really helped.

Thank you Hushpower and lollo2 for the great advice. I'm hoping I've got it right? I've attached a few screenshots and 2 new captures.

Most of the time after removing the black borders with the "set capture clipping" crop, the preview screen would then disappear when I activated the histogram. I only needed the procamp video levels and the histogram display and they consistently worked in tandem. The screenshots attached with the preview screen, histogram & video levels were rare.
I'm hoping if my procamp settings are correct the crushed blacks and blown whites will have improved.

Take the following with a grain of salt because I am not an expert!

Those captures look pretty dang good to me! Well done.

Yes, I regularly have to pull the plug on the 710, re-insert it and restart VDub to get things to work properly.

I think histogram 3 is better than 6: 6 looks a bit too edgy: note the thin red line at the left edge and the sharp drop off on the right edge. 5 could have the contrast upped a bit (and Brightness to move it a bit to the right) to expand the whole histogram a bit.

I think it's better to be a bit dark; you can always brighten things up with Colormill (VDub filter). If things are too bright, you won't get detail back.

Thank you for the compliment Hushpower. I will take into account what you said about the histogram's I can see what you mean. Screenshot 3 looks smoother and wider. I just noticed 5&6 also have more cliff edges to the left.
I think this mean's I'm ready to capture more than just samples. What is the standard length of time you can capture?

For my VHS tapes, I capture the whole shabang, 3 hours worth, in one hit! Then I chop it all up into the various subjects. I'd reckon that would be about 100gb for HUFFYUV (I use MagicYUV as it plays better with my video editor).

That's probably not the most sensible route though, because you will probably find you've got some quite dark "subjects" (night-time party, indoor birthday) and then bright outdoor subjects, which might need different brightness and contrast levels. In that case, it'd be best to capture each subject separately.

If, however, you've got a tape that is pretty much the same all the way through, you can capture it in one hit. You can use VDub to "direct Stream copy" sections of it into separate files for later editing/processing.

Thank you for the advice. I will probably take your sensible route and try and capture 1 hour at a time. I will save them to the internal hd 750gb (not the one with the os) transfer them to an external Fantom hd and then, when I want to edit and restore them I can transfer them back onto the laptop?

That's a good plan. Make sure you back up any files that you can't replace by re-capturing the tapes.

Good advice thank you. I plan to make multiple copies. I only want to capture maybe 2 video's initially and restore & filter those.

Capture "opening presents 1.avi" is ok
Attachment 15297

Capture "opening presents 2.avi" can be improved
Attachment 15298

Used code to check:

Thanks lollo2 for the information. Is that a script I would put into virtualdub before I capture?

No, I used as a post-capture checking.

You can use AviSynth Histograms in real time for tuning procamp before/while capturing, but it is not easy: https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/...-for-Amarec-TV

Follow sanlyn and Hushpower methodology

Thanks lollo2. I need to read more on Avisynth to understand it better. I intend to do this over next few days.