What is this line at the bottom of my capture?
 

Hi everyone!

I've been making a lot of strides in my VHS conversion adventure, and I'm almost completely happy with how things are turning out. If you have the time, I'd love to get an answer to a quick question!

Here is a screenshot of my first capture, attached.

Everything looks really good to me except for what I have circled in red. Is that shaky line on the bottom normal? Is there a way to correct for it, or in other words SHOULD I correct for it? (For reference, my workflow is a JVC HR-S78000U --> DataVideo TBC 4000 --> ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0 --> Windows XP PC with VirtualDub. I have extensively read the guide on how to configure VirtualDub and I downloaded the copy with the filters added. I also looked this phenomenon up and it apparently has to do with overscan? Is that what this is? Thank you so much for all your time and help!

It’s called head-switching noise. Perfectly normal.
In the past this area, and the top and sides, to a similar extent, were not seen due to the aforementioned overscan.

Hi Barry!

Thanks for the information! That term allowed me to elevate my research even more. I really appreciate the reply!

Just to add:

Never attempt to crop/mask while capturing. That is the native image on the tape, just deal with it while capturing. Trying to handle it immediately, not wanting to capture it, is OCD.

Post-capture, mask it, aka cover it in black.

While you can crop it, and sometimes it will be required, you must remember to crop with a post-16px removal 4x3 aspect crop. You can't just clip off pixels from the bottom, and done. Otherwise geometry is wrong, aspect distorted. Further, cropping will stretch internal image, and SD res is already a low res. Even slight changes can be quite noticeable. Hence why masking best.

Sometimes I see "I don't want a black border" (of a mere few pixels), but again we get to OCD. The same people often think nothing of obvious errors, but go bonkers over this. Makes no sense to me.

Thank you, as always, for the valuable insight lordsmurf! I will be sure to keep that in mind! I hope you are doing well!