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While garage sale-ing recently, I found some old VHS tapes - I've now decided I want to start a personal archive and digitize these types of obscure tapes
(programming.dev)
I got an Elgato capture card and a VCR off of EBay and have already digitized three tapes I've found at garage sales.
Any advice for cleaning up the image and audio? I recall there were VCR cleaners but never was confident of their efficacy.
This is excellent advice, thank you! I especially appreciate the video, and I hadn't even thought about framerates varying - very good to remember.
I'll look into cleaning the VCR soon. I got if off of Ebay so the odds the person selling cleaned it is 20/60, so definitely worth a shot.
Got any advice for audio that's particularly noisy, or would that be resolved by cleaning the heads
Yea, The audio and video becomes clearer after you clean that dust off.
I watched probably a dozen different videos, but that simple cleaning with a rubbing alcohol dipped q-tip, squeeze out excess alcohol so it's wet but not dripping, worked best at cleaning off audio video.
Then frame rate and resolution, and Bob's your uncle.
Oh, I'll add, I did try literally every single frame rate resolution and every single checkbox and option in OBS studio and handbrake, and none of the odb options made any difference that I could tell from the default.
I did notice after I digitized the video with OBS that handbrake made it incredibly simple to encode it in a different format if you want, because I wanted mine in a simple MP4 format.
Handelbrake does have a cool filter set built in that alleges to reduce noise, and I did use them, let me see what my custom preset says.
Disclaimer, I believe all the defaults will do exactly what you need. If you just clean the heads and stick to the defaults of 480p and the ntsc or pal frame rate.
But if you do want to try denoising everything, I did think that by encoding my directly digitized videos in 480p at default resolution and then selecting all of the filters except for colourspace in handbrake, The videos looked like 5% better
Haha, so not a crazy amount, but if you want to experiment, everything default for the digitizing itself, and then do all of the editing within program like handbrake.
Attached picture is an example of the filters I used in handbrake.
Colourspace distorted the colors pretty bad. But the denoising and sharpening was pretty cool by a very small amount.