Cleaning up source

[godix]

I own a legit copy of an anime I want to use in VHS format. The problem is my capture card is around 7 years old and does a really, REALLY bad job of capturing and at the moment purchasing another one is outside my financial leage. Unfortunately I'm using an anime that has never been released as DVD so I'm greatly limited in my choice of source. I've done a few tests and downloaded footage actually looks better than what I can get with my capture card. So my question is how would you best recommend cleaning up downloaded footage? I was thinking of making the video then as a last step exporting to BMP and running a photoshop action to do some despeckling and blurring.

Please, before you flame me for using downloaded footage, go re-read my explanation of why that's my best option.....

[trythil]

I own a legit copy of an anime I want to use in VHS format. The problem is my capture card is around 7 years old and does a really, REALLY bad job of capturing and at the moment purchasing another one is outside my financial leage. Unfortunately I'm using an anime that has never been released as DVD so I'm greatly limited in my choice of source. I've done a few tests and downloaded footage actually looks better than what I can get with my capture card. So my question is how would you best recommend cleaning up downloaded footage? I was thinking of making the video then as a last step exporting to BMP and running a photoshop action to do some despeckling and blurring.

Please, before you flame me for using downloaded footage, go re-read my explanation of why that's my best option.....

Is your capture card affected by Macrovision? (Does the brightness of the captured video fluctuate from very bright to very dark?)

If not...

Have you tried using VirtualDub to retouch your footage?

Before you resort to using downloaded footage (which may not be giving you optimal results) try to use VirtualDub to solve your capture problem. I don't know what the nature of your source is, but two VDub filters that work pretty well for retouching footage in general are Tim Park (dokidoki)'s SmoothIQ filter (works to remove those rainbowing artifacts) and Donald Graft's msharpen/xsharpen filters (edge-based and brightness/proximity-based sharpening, respectively). Check out http://shelob.mordor.net/dgraft/

www.fiction.org/www/smoothiq is currently down, but you may be able to find SmoothIQ elsewhere (like by PMing dokidoki )

Anyway, it's far easier to do such retouching operations in a tool like VirtualDub.

[ErMaC]

Actually I would say it's far better to do in AVISynth.

If you read the video guide there's a section on making footage look better. All of those filtering techniques (aside from possibly Convolution3d) can be used to make your footage better.

[RadicalEd0]

C3D does have a spatial cleaner and it actually does do a pretty good job of cleaning up mosquito noise and small artifacts. Anyway I'm pretty sure SmartSmootherHQ is still the best for hardcore cleanup, although it is a good bit slower than the rest.