Cleaning up Image quality of old VHS tapes

Question

Level 1

66 points

Cleaning up Image quality of old VHS tapes

Is there anything you can do in final cut pro to clean up the image quality of captured footage.. even slightly? I am capturing a bunch of old VHS and Hi8 tapes from the early 90's and the image quality is quite bad. Is there anything I can do to fix this at all?

Macbook pro 17'', Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Posted on Mar 13, 2007 8:16 AM

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Answer 1

Mar 13, 2007 8:56 AM in response to sjpc33

What kind of image quality problems are you having? Are we talking video noise, or color problems and brightness/contrast issues?

Color/brightness/contrast issues can be somewhat fixed. FCP has a color correction tool that allows you to also fix brightness and contrast. Also, the color correction filter has an auto feature for white and black.

Hope this helps.

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Answer 2

sjpc33 Author

Level 1

66 points

Mar 13, 2007 8:58 AM in response to Experimental

Video noise and the color. I know there is a way to fix the color, althought I forget how to do it.. but as far as video noise there is nothing you can do? Are there any programs you can buy to fix this aka digitally remaster the footage?

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Answer 3

Jim Cookman

Level 7

23,447 points

Mar 13, 2007 9:22 AM in response to sjpc33

call around to your nearest video rental house and rent a timebase corrector, or a deck that has one.

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Answer 4

Mar 13, 2007 12:15 PM in response to Jim Cookman

There is also a little trick I use when I see particularly bad anlog dropouts on this type of footage.

Usually these dropouts appear as a horizontal stripe of yuckiness on only one field of a frame. I will often razor blade around just the one frame showing the dropout, and apply a de-interlace filter to that frame. I'll then change the settings of the filter until I find the field that does not have the dropout.

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