VHS-C capture setup: cropping, proc amp, PAL?
 

Hi All,

After weeks of long reading and setting up the system, I could manage a full length capture of one cassette. Now I have several questions. My setup,

Win7 x64, virtualdub64 1.10.4, huffyuv 2.1.1
Panasonic palmcorder, passthrough TBC and Ezcap 116 as capture
Capture will be edited in premiere pro (timeline editing and titles, etc)
Final output will be a file on PC, which will be playable on HDTV as well and no DVD output planned.

So here comes the questions;

1. Capture filter: Does is matter which PAL (B,D,H etc) if it is a cassette recorded in camcorder?
2. Video Proc Amp: Should I adjust color, brightness and sharpening from here or after capture in premiere pro
3. Cropping: I would like to crop from left/right and bottom a little bit to get rid of black and moving parts. How much can I crop and is it better to resize the end file to 768x576 square pixels if I am correct?

In general it is better to get the analog signal (e.g., brightness, contrast, colors) as good as you can while still in the analog domain, before digitizing. Once digitized, any image processing can introduce truncation and/or rounding errors and artifacts that you would want to minimize. This is because in the digital signal all values are in discrete steps, not a smooth continuum (like the difference between stairs and ramps)

The edge stuff you speak to is in the over scan area not normally seen on a TV set (even HDTV depending on configuration options/settings), but that can be seen on typical computer monitors. I would mask it (e.g., narrow black bars), not scale, to avoid introducing scaling artifacts and to avoid cutting into the image areas if viewed on a TV at some later date. I've read that BBC suggests 3.5% per edge for the so called "action safe" area, but I would do what is necessary to hide what you don't want to see - it may well be less.

If you really want to scale for computer display, make that the last step after all other processing and editing and apply it only to your distribution copy.

Sorry but I can't speak to PAL.

Congrats! :thumb:

Remember to keep interlaced.

Save archival master as interlaced MPEG, make copy as deinterlaced MP4 for streaming.

Some PALs are the same, some not. PAL-M, for example, is 29.97fps with PAL color, similar to PAL60. UK is PAL-I, for example.
See all here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAL#PAL_broadcast_systems

You can do both. Fix as much in analog domain as possible, then finish up correction in post (NLE).

Don't crop, mask. Several forum topics cover this.
For example: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...r-masking.html