I need help Fine tuning posts

[rmt@36]

Hi all

As you can see if you downloaded, Egi Barany that the picture was very bright. It was the same on the VHS movie I had.

What I use is Pinnacle Dazzle to get it on the computer, then I use vob sub to join them and the I use Auto GK 2.40.

Is there a way of fixing the picture before I post it or am I hooped in that sense?

Also I have a lot of movies that have stunted frames is there a way of doing some magic so that I can get a fuller frame?

I don't like 320x whatever.

Any help would be greatly appreciated so that I can make my posts a lot more acceptable to all.

Thanks in advance

[emuler]

You can do it while capturing (adjust the video settings in the capture driver) or you can do it after capturing. I'm not much into AutoGK but I'm sure there are settings for adding filters and tweaking the output.

[Rich]

to be honest I know absolutely nothing about this, but i do know that virtualdub has hundreds of filters available for editing video files, might be worth a look...

[FLL]

Hi all

As you can see if you downloaded, Egi Barany that the picture was very bright. It was the same on the VHS movie I had.

What I use is Pinnacle Dazzle to get it on the computer, then I use vob sub to join them and the I use Auto GK 2.40.

Is there a way of fixing the picture before I post it or am I hooped in that sense?

Also I have a lot of movies that have stunted frames is there a way of doing some magic so that I can get a fuller frame?

I don't like 320x whatever.

Any help would be greatly appreciated so that I can make my posts a lot more acceptable to all.

Thanks in advance

I experimented a lot with various ways of encoding VHS, I have several I'd like to release here. I haven't released them yet because I was never completely satisfied and kept experimenting and learning, I am too much of a perfectionist sometimes.

You probably don't need to join the VOBs before feeding them to AutoGK, if they are named properly AutoGK processes them all in sequence.

I bought and tested a Pinnacle video capture, and had problems. At the highest bitrate it demands too much CPU (It's USB) and as a result the audio gets out of sync easily. I then bought a much faster desktop for encoding but the hard drive died and I haven't been able to test yet. The Pinnacle does have the ability to tweak the video, which I liked, and as emuler suggests that's a good place to process the video. (Take care of it there and you can use AutoGK probably).

The Pinnacle puts out DV format (720x480), AutoGK is apparently deciding to make it 320 wide. You can set the width in AutoGK (advanced settings), but be careful of setting it too high because it looks bigger on the screen but robs you of bandwidth. The bigger the picture the more space it takes to encode it, and there is less bandwidth available for fine detail and for dealing with motion in successive frames. AutoGK computes the highest resolution you can use without compromising quality, though I myself usually set the minimum to 512. If the automatic width AutoGK chooses is far to small for you consider increasing the AVI size.

AutoGK does not allow for filter selection (except for sharpen, accessed via Ctrl-F9), it tests the video and automatically adds the common filters it believes you need (such as for noise). To get around this for VHS I have moved on to trying GK, which allows a lot more tweaking and is not as automatic. You have a much wider variety of things you can do, and it calls VirtualDub which has lots of filters, but there is relatively little guidance available on what to choose to solve a given issue, so I am still figuring it out. VirtualDub by itself (without GK) is too much for me, because you need to manually take care of a bunch of things like demuxing/converting/recombining the audio.

One major thing I can say based on Egi Barany and for VHS rips in general: crop the picture! AutoGK can do this, using Ctrl-F9, you need to use preview to figure out how much to crop. When VHS is captured there is almost always some noise or black space at the top and bottom (and a little smearing on the left and right). Cropping keeps from wasting bandwidth on that part of the picture and thus allows the real picture to be better quality. I am mad at myself for not quickly getting a Baby Love encoding out because the one which showed up (from the same source I had) was the full 720x480 and wasn't cropped at all, you can see junk at the bottom and smearing at the other borders rather than a fully crisp picture which looks a lot nicer.

I will update this as I learn more... I also encourage anyone else at FLM to contribute any advice!

[emuler]

If you're going to adjust the video in the capture device itself, you should probably calibrate your monitor first.

[rmt@36]

Still working on it

Thanks for the help so far

Please keep the suggestions coming

[emuler]

Play a movie that you know is good visually and which has a similar scene. Then adjust the capture settings so that the picture looks as close to the good one as possible. Go back and forth several times if necessary.

The point is, the adjustments will have to be made subjectively. That means your opinion matters, since you will be the one making the decisions.

Find the post I made about cleaning the VCR head. You'll be amazed how much cr@p comes off that shiny drum.