VHS black shadows after white text?
 

Hi

Thanx for a great forum!

I'm setting up to capturing the old family VHS films.
I bought a used JVC HM-DR10000EU connected via s-video to a conexant polaris video USB-dongle in a win7x64 laptop. I'm captureing i Virtualdub with lagarith YUY2.

1. I get a white horisontal shadow, to the right, when white text is shown over dark background. Its both in the S-video and the composite. The snapshot picture is from a commercial tape, so it shouldn't be in the original tape. I'm guessing this is related to my capturing setup or the VCR. Any clues to if I can expect to get rid of this before capture?

2. VirtualDub states Video Reasmple by 1.0003x, but no dropped frames. What does this mean? Is it to keep up with the audio? Is it an issue I should address?

Very greatful for advice!

Luma ghosting.

It may be embedded in the source tape. An earlier iteration probably had composite.

Sometimes it's just the VCR.

Ok. Thanx for the reply.
Im thinking of maybe upgrading the capture device. Maybe one of those ATI Wonder USB 2.0. Would that help me in this case?

Is that a PAL or NTSC tape? I've had some theories about tapes doing that if they are NTSC with a 7.5IRE black level, but that doesn't really explain it if it is PAL or NTSC-J which use Zero IRE as black.

Do tell. :idea:

Its PAL.
I just confirmed that the shadows are present also without my capture card.
So, moving on with caprure, and will see if I manage to do some post filtering. I have a ferling itll be less noticable once I get the levels normalized

-- merged --

Im doing my best to see any differences in selection of BEST and R3 when capturing, but cant really se neither pros or cons as discussed in this forum. Matne my eyes arent trained enough

My theory was that if using a zero black level IRE system like PAL or NTSC-J that any "reactive inductance" to the negative direction (sub black) immediately following high/bright signals wouldn't be an issue in those systems because sub black would get "clipped" zero IRE like the surrounding black background of the credits, but apparently that's not the case if your tape is PAL and it does it too. I do have one single NTSC-J tape and I'll have to see if it has any credits where I can test that or not.

Definitely not an electrical or video engineer, I just figured that's why the shadows happen, so could be wrong.

Done the capture, mostly fiddeling with filters for the fine grained noise. Im guessing there's no magic filter for luma ghosting? Theres subtitles throughout the video, so its a little annoying when the rest actually looks kindof good

For text-on-black images like that, it's easy to lower the black level to below what the average display resolves.

Ah, so simply adjust levels?

Yes, basically. Increase contrast and decrease brightness.