Vegas Newbie

Harleyguy wrote on 5/4/2004, 5:05 AM
I am finally finished editing my first DVD....WOOOHOO!!!
Anyway my question is, why does the finished product look worse then the actual VHS??
I understand it has something to do with the screen resolution on a VHS to DVD.But i dont quite understand why i have traded so many DVD's and not all of them look funky like mine.....Granted it's still very watchable but i was just wondering why the fluctuation in Discs...My PC is MORE then enough to handle rendering...I just bought a Canopus ADVC-100 that i am using...

Any ideas??

Comments

farss wrote on 5/4/2004, 5:35 AM
It's very much subject to the quality of the original VHS material.
If you have very clean VHS to start with you'll get very good results but converting to DVD from poor VHS it'll look worse on DVD. The other thing is with poor VHS you can improve things by encoding at a higher bitrate but you fit less on the DVD.
You see the mpeg encoders have no real way of knowing what in the video is meant to be in the video and what isn't. So if your video has lots of noise or line jitter etc then the bandwidth available to the encoder gets used up encoding the 'rubbish'. Worse still when it hits the bandwidth limit it'll tend to turn little bits of noise into bigger bits or else freeze them for a number of frames.
So the trick is to clean up the video before it gets encoded. Firstly do whatever you can to reduce noise, I use the ADVC-300 which has digital noise reduction which can help a lot. In combination with the time base correction you end up with a fairly solid VHS signal. Once you've got that into Vegas mask out the edges of the video, bring the mask in far enough if needed to mask the head switching garbage at the bottom of the frame. If you've got really noisy video you can try a small amount of median blur although it'll take forever to render. Black restore FX and / or Broadcast Colors can also help a little by clamping levels and cutting back on the noise.
Good idea, start with a bit of really clean VHS as a test, then you'll see just how good it can get. Mostly my clients remark that the DVD looks much better than the VHS tape ever did.