my equipment: JVC HR-S9600, Panasonic DMR-ES10, Hauppauge USB-Live2.
After recording several VHS cassettes, I noticed that every recording has stationary vertical lines appearing in the same positions. These lines are visible both in the raw capture produced by VirtualDub and after deinterlacing with Hybrid, so I’ve attached an MP4 sample file due to its smaller file size. You can even see the lines on the blue screen from the VCR. Removing the Panasonic from the workflow didn’t make any difference.
I also attached two screenshots of VirtualDub when using S-Video and Composite connections. It appears that the vertical lines are not there when using Composite, although you can still detect traces of them near the “A” in the screenshot.
VHS recordings arent capable of pictures with such fine detail as those thin black vertical lines. The higher resolution of an S-VHS playback is possibly displaying these fine lines and patterns, whatever their origin.
There's an old saying: "open the window wider and more muck blows in."
Definitely the static vertical "lines" effect is more visible in the video sample than in static images. The VCR blue screen is sadly of no use to determine practically anything, it is not a 100 % S-Video signal as the way the VCRs generate them is really badly implemented and thus your S-Video image looks like it has chroma crosstalk into the luma, visible as a checkerboard, which is not related to the vertical lines. Additionally, it isn't strange for VCR menu screens to not be compliant to strict PAL/NTSC standards, it has been documented in this forum.
I do not have experience with your capture device but I think the vertical lines could be caused by an incorrect capture resolution that causes an unnecessary scaling of the video. Please post your capture resolution settings, maybe a screenshot. Please also note that your video sample looks overblown on the highlights, could be bad proc amp settings or the effect of the Panasonic DMR.
The following users thank fafeco for this useful post:
marank (03-04-2025)
Well, i fell a little stupid now. I would have bet that my resolution settings are correct, but indeed they were set to 768x576! Thanks for putting me on the right track! Setting the resolution to 720x576 fixed the problem.
I've attached a fixed version of the same clip as well as my settings in the Capture Pin and Capture Filter windows.
Regarding overblown highlights: Could it be that the sun is just too bright in that specific shot? I'll look for more examples when viewing my captures.
EDIT: I captured that shot without the Panasonic in between, see "no-pan" file.
Fantastic! Your resolution settings look OK now. Regarding the levels, the white parts still look blown out to me without the Panasonic inbetween. Before anything else, you should try to adjust the proc amp levels of your capture card before capturing, as overblown highlights or dark shadows can't be fixed in post. Sanlyn explained it in this post, I would recommend that you read all the guide to not miss any other important procedures. Try it first without the Panasonic, then add it and watch closely that it doesn't internally overblow any bright regions, as it is known to do this.
PS: maybe you already noticed it but the aspect ratio of the encoded .mp4 looks slightly wrong, you should set it to stretch the video back to 4:3, or set the flag if the format allows it.
Thanks for all that information! I’m currently not at home, but will give it a try next week.
Regarding aspect ratio: I know that with Hybrid I can resize the frames, but what about the flag thing? Where can I set that, and how?
