Converting "really bad video" to DVD

[Alan Henderson]

I have taken some old Hi8 and VHS videos and copied to MiniDV.

For the past few days, I have been struggling with making the quality somewhat better.

I have been working in Vegas 6.0, MovieFactory and TMPGEnc.

All the videos were shot in interior low light.

So far, they still look really, really bad.

Is there a "magic" product out there that can dramatically improve the quality of these videos?

thanks..alan

[Jack Zhang]

Magic Bullet?

Various VirtualDub filters will do the job too.

[Mike Kujbida]

Several folks here have been quite happy with the results from Neat Video.
If you're looking for some free ones to try, Mike Crash has a noise reduction filter (and lots more!!) on his site.

[Ian Stark]

I used Neat Video as an After Effects plugin on a client project and the results were quite good. The source video had a lot of noise due to low light + automatic gain on the camera (ugh!) and Neat cleaned it up to a reasonably acceptable level. No idea how it performs under Vegas but speed was not high on it's feature list (understandably). There are different levels of Neat, I believe, starting with a consumer version which I believe is quite cheap. I have never bought the software as it was already installed on my clients system but if ever I need to purchase a noise reduction tool, this is what I'd go for.

Not sure that Magic Bullet's Deartifacter is the right tool - I may be wrong here but I believe it's for removing DV compression artifacts rather than the cleaning up of poor quality video.

[Giroud Francois]

"really bad" means nothing.
if your video suffer from weaknesses, you have to name them and use a strategy to correct each problem , sometimes in a specific order.
The best program i know for this is virtualdub, with its many plugins.

[Tim OBrien]

Unfortunately, as my old computer professor used to say, "Garbage In, Garbage Out."

Whatever quality you've got is all that's there and NOTHING is going to magically create data that just isn't there...

[Ian Stark]

Originally Posted by Tim OBrien

NOTHING is going to magically create data that just isn't there...

Tim, I beg to differ!

http://www.neatvideo.com/examples.html

OK, OK, they're promotional stills but in my (admittedly limited) real world experience you really can achieve quite good results. Whether it's actually removing unwanted data that IS there or creating data that ISN'T there, is up for debate. The fact remains that you can take garbage and sometimes turn it into something reasonable. Stress 'sometimes', 'reasonable' and 'quite good'.

[Alan Henderson]

I purchased the Home version and so far, at least what I see on the monitor, this is exactly what I was looking for.

From day 1, I have always used NeatImage for digital stills.

This is equally good, or better.

All I was wanting was to make bad video better.

This fits the bill exactly.

Thanks again for all the suggestions.

alan

[Jeff Harper]

Wow, I don't usually make impulsive purchases, but Neat looks really "neat". If their results are half as good as the promos, I can see value in the product.

[Ian Stark]

http://www.neatvideo.com/download.html

There ya go, Jeff! Demo download page for you.

[Jeff Harper]

Thank you sir!

Speaking for myself only, in today's world it seems everyone is looking for magic solutions to problems instead of dealing with the causes. I find myself becoming judgemental and hypercritical at times as a result. I almost did not finish reading the posts of this thread, due to that very thinking. I am so glad I kept reading.

I have to learn, sometimes more than once, that it is a huge world with many possibilties and answers. Often, there might be nothing to be done to solve a problem but accept it, but it is SO important to keep my open to new ideas for those times that yes, something CAN be done, and just because I do not know the answer doesn't mean if doesn't exist.

Thank you very much for posting, William!