old VHS footage Workflow
 

Hello all,
I have a question I hope someone can give me a few pointers. I have allot of old footage on VHS tapes and I'm capturing the footage on my computer and making DVD's. I'm use to my HDV footage and don't need to do much to it to make it look good but with this footage I'm not sure what to do and what plugins to use I know without seeing the footage it's hard to say but if you can give me a few tips I start from there. Thank's for any advice you all can give.

Chet

To be honest, even though I own Premiere I find the freeware Virtualdub and Avisynth much more convenient for the kind of processing you are doing.

You will want to do color and contrast correction, temporal and spatial noise smoothing, and probably chroma noise smoothing - nice freeware filters for all of those are available for both Vdub and avisynth and there's a good introductory guide here: http://arstechnica.com/guides/tweaks/cleaning.ars

I assume Premier has similar filters available, so otehrs will proably give you some advice there.

I always got the best results capturing VHS at Half D1 (352x480 for NTSC) for long programs and/or video with a lot of motion. It more closely matches the VHS resolution and actually looks better than creating a bunch of extra pixels.

I'm no expert.....
I used an old vhs camera to shoot a short film last year and captured the footage directly to dv tape using my sony dv camera and a vcr. Then I had dv to work with in PPro 1.5

Thank's all for the suggestions. I tried VirtualDub but keep getting this one error with this one filter 2D Cleaner Optimized 0.9 so I'm not sure. Premire don't have the same plugins so I'm not sure where to look. Thank's again all for the help.

Chet