@JeffB2310

Greetings Jeff,

As John say @AAProds is the all seeing, all knowing guru for VHS/DV capture & editing.

I've done a fair bit of that stuff myself and the best bits of advice I can give you are:

1. If the DV film plays in the camera on your TV then the standard H.264 presets in Magix will be good enough because, as John EB says, the TV upsacels far better than a computer monitor,
2. You will probably want to sharpen the video. This is fine but be careful. In my experience if you sharpen to look good on a computer monitor it will look oversharp on the 4K TV - if you can understand that. Colours and audio have a tendency to look and sound the same on either screen.

The best thing to do initially is try playing about with the file. Edit it and re-encode a small section and see what it looks like. What's satisfactory for me may not be for you or others in the family. The best you can do is to make it look good for you.

These are the simple thing I do with DV captured files; they tend to be reasonably clean and sharp anyway - at least they are from my old Sony TR???. VHS capture - now that's another ball game.

AndyW

Thanks. So what I have tried is:

1. Created project: with the Movie Settings - HDTV, at 25 fps, and selecting the default FullHD 1080p (W1920xH1080) and 16:9 ratio. I'm not sure if this is in line with recommendations? The automatically adjust new images to fill screen (borders are faded out) box was also checked.

2. Captured video from the Mini DV tape in my old Sony DCR-PC110E PAL, by selecting the recording source as my DV Camera, without checking the box to record DV as an MPEG at this stage. Capturing this via a DV Firewire IEEE 1394 run between the camera (4 pin) to the Firewire card and port (6 pin) on the pc. With the automatic scene detect.

3. Constructed the movie using the relevant scenes (Takes). Restoring original sound.

4. Finished the movie by outputting as a video file. Saving on computer as a file with Quality: set at DVD quality (720x576). Any higher and the application returns an message advising that the set export quality is higher than the quality of the source video, and that improvement to the quality of the image material will not be achieved by saving. It suggests to avoid creating an unnecessarily large file to save the file with lower quality setting. Format: MPEG 4, which it states should be used if I wish to save the video in higher quality HD resolution.

The final MPEG file will replay using both my PC (movie player) and through my high definition, 4k TV, where I am able to stream this directly over my home sharing network. The picture quality is best described as 'fair' on both, but then the TV screen size is also significant at 62 inches.

I'm just not sure whether I am deriving the best quality playback possible from this set up.

I haven't tried sharpening the final film which I presume I could experiment with using the Effects?

I'm not sure if there are any obvious mistakes in any of the above otherwise.

I did previously have an option asking if I wanted to adjust the captured video to match the movie settings, but this offer hasn't been repeated.

Thanks to all for their helpful suggestions once again.

@JeffB2310

Hi.

I think the problem is one of seeing old footage on new digital screens. Older systems used CRT monitors or TV screens where individual pixels were magnitudes larger than the pixels of modern screens so things like the sharpness you would have seen and more importantly the lack of pixels in the recordings for things like eye and hair detail would have used less pixels to define that part of the image. Contrast would have had less dynamic range etc. Those details tend to get lost when watched on a monitor with more densely packed pixels, even when up-scaled by normal methods.

There are programs out there that claim to regain some of that back through the use of AI such as Topaz Video AI but how good these programs actually are or how easy to set up I'm not sure and have no experience of.

My experience is watching gamers get retro gear to play retro games with at gaming contests and festivals, where detail and life come back into such older games, assuming they have found a good conditioned CRT monitor or TV. There I have seen one to one differences of a game being played and shown on same sized digital and analog monitors at the same time. I'm assuming the same must hold true for video content. Certainly software enhancement is the route most broadcasting companies go down when restoring older programs.

Ray.

@JeffB2310

Sorry, I'm a bit late to the party. To comment on the previous posts:

Movie Settings

I suggest you make these in 4:3 format. If you make the movie settings 16:9, you will be adding black side bars, because your 4:3 video shouldn't be stretched out to 16:9. All players and TVs I've used recently, including i-devices and phones, will display 4:3 videos correctly; the videos do not need to be 16:9. That is, the video will be displayed in the centre of the screen with "blank" sides. Additionally, YT will display 4:3 with no bars; if you give it 4:3 video encoded into 16:9, the black side bars will be considered video and will be displayed by YT, which is undesirable, especially on a phone in Portrait mode.

Points 2 and 3 are fine.

I did previously have an option asking if I wanted to adjust the captured video to match the movie settings, but this offer hasn't been repeated.

That pops up if you try to import a video that has a different parameter eg frame rate, resolution or ratio to the movie settings. If your movie settings are what you want, then click "do not adjust".

Editing

You may have unwanted edges, such as thin green lines down one side of your video; you can use the Section effect to crop them off; just make sure you retain the 4:3 ratio.

Export

Provided you have the same "ratio" set in the movie settings ie 4:3 as the export, you can ignore any messages about differences between the two. You can export at 720x576 or higher, if you wish. I have seen very slight visual improvement on my TV when exporting at 1440x1080 (still 4:3, you'll have to type those numbers into the three dots button next to "resolution" in the export settings), but others have not. The argument on other forums is that 1440x1080 is easier to upscale by a monitor or TV than 720x576. The critical factor in export quality is bitrate, which you access on the Export>Advanced screen. As @me_again Andy says, you can experiment with this on a short range. Using the MPEG-4 export (for H264/AVC video), start off at Average 6000kbps, Max 8000kbps. Set the Coding quality to Best and the audio to 192kbps. If you want to use your video in Whatsapp, tick the "Streamable" option. If you know you video is only going to be for very small screens such as phones, you can bring the video way down to 2000kbps or lower.

Overall, you should find only a little degradation; I concur with a just a little sharpening (20-30) to help define the often furry edges of SD video.

Brilliant. Thanks for such a comprehensive explanation. Look forward to trying this out asap. Will revert back to you if I have any queries. Jeff

Hi. I have now managed to export a movie using the above settings. However, if I compare this with the imported .avi footage, the quality appears slightly poorer. Is the .avi footage going to be superior? I wonder whether I should save the finished movie as a .avi file too although it does result in a much bigger file. Other more modern MPEG 4 files created on new devices do however have very crisp images. Sorry, but I am starting from a VERY low knowledge base.