I’ve recently started digitizing my mother-in-law’s collection of home movies. What I would love is some recommendations or tweaks I can do to improve the quality and remove any combing or minimize static. I am not particularly concerned with audio quality, but I’ll list it below as well.

And so far I’m enjoying the processes. It’s really fun to see old videos and to learn a bit about video formats and encoding. I’m an amateur when it comes to these kinds of things so I’m learning as I go along. Each tape I make the picture clearer and the file size smaller!

Recording

  • Sony Handycam (DCR-TRV27)
  • Various DV 60/90 cassette tapes
  • Seemingly ran in standard recording mode (tapes are 60 minutes)

VCR

* I have ordered a A/V to RCA cable which is the manufacturer’s recommended connection, but unsure about the effects on quality

Software

  • OBS for recording the VCR feed
    • Downscale Filter: Bicubic (Sharpened scaling, 16 samples)
    • Deinterlace - Linear 2x
    • 720x540 @ 29.97 FPS (NTSC) (upscaled from 720x480)
    • “Indistinguishable Quality, Large File Size”
      • .mkv format with H.264 encoder
    • Audio Encoder AAC
    • Audio 48khz steroe
  • Handbrake for re-encoding
    • 720x480 @ 29.97 FPS
    • H.264 (x264) MKV format
    • No additional deinterlacing
    • “Constant Quality” set to 20
    • Audio Encoder AAC
  • shundi82@sh.itjust.works
    2·
    3 months ago

    OK, followup to my last “PS”. Even though no one asked, but I’ve got some upvotes:

    Here’s a short function I didn’t test extensively (can’t post the one I use, because that one’s specific to our work and is intertwined with more of our functions like checking a file’s extension and properties to automatically determine its field order and if it needs to be deinterlaced):

    It worked in a few short tests, so it should be OK, but if anyone notices a problem, feel free to add to that:

    function tff_for_all(clip c, string "fieldorder") {
  #Usage if source is TFF: tff_for_all("tff") | else if BFF or unknown (will assume BFF): tff_for_all() or tff_for_all("bff")
  fieldorder = default(fieldorder, "bff")
  c
  fieldorder == "bff" ? propSet("_FieldBased", 1).AssumeBFF().DoubleWeave().SelectOdd() : last
  propSet("_FieldBased", 2).AssumeTFF()
}