How do I improve old video movies?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Frank Martin
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Frank Martin

I have an old tape camcorder with video output and I want to put all my old
tapes on to DVDs.

I will buy a video-capture card with sound to do this.

I want to know how to "photoshop" the movies, that is how can I enhance the
movie frame-by-frame using software.
Microsoft has a thing called 'MovieMaker' and I want to download my movies
via the videocard on to this.

Can someone help me with the most efficient way to do this and to enhance
the movie images?

Please help, Frank
 
MovieMaker won't capture directly from the analog camcorder. You'll have to
use analog capture software and an analog capture card... see
www.videohelp.com.

Once it's captured, Windows MovieMaker will happily edit the footage.

If you're familiar with PhotoShop, you might want to try Adobe's Premiere
(www.adobe.com) But it's a long very tiring job to enhance each frame...
there will be 30 of them per second if you're in NTSC land and 25 per second
if you're in PAL land.
 
Sony makes a little box, you just plug you vcr in, push play and push record
and it puts on DVD for you. Save hundreds of hours. Records in real time.
It's only $235.00
 
there is very little you can do to "enhance" the video. At best you can hope
fore 5% improvement. First you need a good video capture card. It is best if
the card can capture it in raw MPEG video if you will be doing a lot of
editing, witch you will need to do to improve to video. Then you will need a
good video editing program Microsoft's Movie Maker is not one of them. Movie
Maker can only do the most basic things and save in Microsoft's formats. A
good video editing software is Video Mach from Gromada.com and it is free
fore non commercial use! The two easiest ways to improve the video are,
bicubic resizeing and psychovisual enhancement. not all codecs can use
bicubic and psychovisual enhancement so you will need to find a codec that
can.
 
I'd tend to disagree with using raw mpeg, dv-avi is a much easier format to
edit, it is uncompressed at the capture stage and you can edit frame by
frame. Mpegs would limit editing to i frames only, which may be seconds
apart. I must say though I haven't heard of Video Mach. MM can save in a
variety of formats, dv-avi being one and is distinctly not MS only.
A good video editing app will allow you to do what you want to do. If the
quality is poor, then you cannot hope to improve it and I'd say your 5% may
be right...crap in crap out and all that :)

If you use photoshop and want to do each frame individually, then why not
export all the frames and do it in photoshop, then put them all back into an
editor, very long work, not something I'd do.......

--
Graham Hughes
MVP Digital Media
www.myvideoproblems.co.uk
www.dvds2treasure.com
www.simplydv.com
 
In fact the only person I can think of that might even attempt it is George
Lucas... and then only with a large team of experts and a LOT of computers!
But then he also has a large budget.
 
I have an old tape camcorder with video output and I want to put all my old
tapes on to DVDs.

I will buy a video-capture card with sound to do this.

I want to know how to "photoshop" the movies, that is how can I enhance the
movie frame-by-frame using software.
Microsoft has a thing called 'MovieMaker' and I want to download my movies
via the videocard on to this.

Can someone help me with the most efficient way to do this and to enhance
the movie images?
Click to expand...

Go to the Canopus website and look for their latest external firewire
capture device (the ADVC-300 ??). It is said to actually make VHS
captures look better than the original. It is somewhat expensive (~
$500.), but I've read nothing but excellent reviews about it in the
rec.video.desktop group.
 
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