home movies to dvd

HaroldC wrote on 6/4/2006, 6:16 PM

A friend of mine has some old home movies from the mid-fifties that were put on video cassette in 1990. I'm in the process of transferring them to dvd. Much of the video is dark and all of it is grainy. Also there are parts that have some red tinting. Any suggestions as to improving the video quality? Also, is it better to insert the scene markers after the video effects editing or before? Or is there a difference?

Thanks

Comments

TLF wrote on 6/5/2006, 2:45 AM

If you have the platinum edition of VMS yo can use the colour correction plugin to remove colour casts. It may take a little practice to get right, but it will be worth it.

Add markers AFTER the editing is complete.

Worley

bjrohner wrote on 6/5/2006, 6:36 AM

Harold,

I've been fighting the same battles.

At www.vasst.com/training/Vegasplugs.htm is a list of plugins for Vegas. The Auto Levels one is a free download and with a little tweaking works great at putting the image levels approximately where you want them. I've found that most my old movies were over saturated and using the Sony HSL to drop the saturation levels abit worked fine without resorting to using the color corrector.

The Sony Color Curves seems to work best for adding even more brightness and contrast. You just drag the upper right and lower left arms around to get the mix you want.

Unfortunately, pumping up the brightness also pumps up the noise levels. The Sony Median set at light noise reduction helps the noise grain problem somewhat.
In fact you can pump the levels up a hair higher than the default without degrading the imaged too much.

A program called Neat Video is excellent for cleaning up this kind of noise, however, it is only out for premiere, ect. and won't be supporting Vegas for a few months yet. It is worth the wait. It can completely remove any noise and sharpen the image at the same time without any degradation. I've been using their photo cleaning version for years.

One other thing when you use the median plug or any other video cleaner, expect everything to slow down. Your preview won't want to work and rendering times will triple or more. Turn the cleaner plug-in off while your editing and turn it back on only when you want a quick overall view or you're ready to render.

Bob