Make this a project by itself within Premiere because you may choose to save the unedited version to DVD. I first go through and pull out all the real junk – start of the tape, low battery, crash-edits, footage (pictures of feet when someone forgot to turn off the camera), 8-minutes of the inside of the camera bag, and other distracting elements. The raw material is then opened in Adobe Premiere for clean up. I use a capture card to capture the analog audio and video to hard-drive (as an avi file). This is manageable from a hard-drive standpoint, and conveniently fits on a miniDV tape, VHS tape, and of course a DVD. Here’s what I’m doing: First, I sorted the old tapes by date and divided most of the source material into 45-60minute projects. Some of them also have the ability to do some picture noise-reduction. You can however, make it look BETTER – sometimes a LOT better! You can purchase some plug-ins that might help here – Vixen or Video Finesse (and others) provide proc-amp type controls within older versions of Premiere. I have searched-there’s NO magic button, plug-in, or procedure that will make that wobbly hand-held old camcorder footage look as good as a $50K high-end camera on a rock-solid tripod, and run by an experienced camera op. My opinion – it will eventually come down to how much money, time, and effort you are willing to spend to preserve your history. I have done tons of old family video, some of it from the late-70’s. I don’t know how old the footage is that you are talking about, so let me assume VHS camera originals, probably shot with a consumer-level camcorder. I’d rather not re-invent the wheel here, since I know I’m only one of squillions who has tackled such a project. It seems like there should be some better techniques or software to deal with these typical VHS image quality issues on old tapes. Still, the magic green button is the best I can do at the moment for most tapes, and I just record the signal being corrected live by the VCR. It does a fantastic job with common color noise, but it softens the picture a good bit and can sometimes create odd “schmooey” motion atrifacts. Also, my JVC VCR has what I affectionately call “The Magic Green Button,” that activates a time base corrector and 4 MB frame buffer noise reduction system. That helps on REALLY crappy tapes, especially from bad TV broadcasts, but it really softens things and causes weird interlacing lines on some movement. I’ve experimented with the classic trick of duplicating the footage on track 2, changing its opacity, and shifitng off by one frame. I think it’s about time to begin one of those “archive the family videos” projects, and I’d like to nail down a practical set of techniques for improving the most typical old VHS quality problems (color noise, weak signal level, warped edges, etc.).Īnyone have ideas from something you’ve tried, read, or invented to deal with such problems in Premiere? I’m using Premiere Pro 1.5 and a Matrox rt.x100 card, along with a nice JVC HR-S9911U S-VHS VCR.
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