(Edit: if this post is too off-topic for this thread then my apologies; got too carried away here maybe :) I'll trim this post if you want))
I have done a lot of averging with VHS captures, and I really can't see anyone who is trying to achieve higher end quality not at least giving it a try to see what they think. For me, the difference is usually quite striking when you take a close look at the image (zoom in!). I would recommend at least four captures. Beyond six is not necessary in my opinion except for the highest possible quality extraction. I use the Average dll for Avisynth. Notes:
- Do not capture uncompressed! Use HuffYUV (or something newer that does the same trick?) It is a waste of hard drive space to do uncompressed when you have HuffYUV (and other lossless codecs). :)
- If you are worried about hard drive space you can in a pinch, as said, do two captures and average them, then delete the two sources (keep the average) then do another capture, average that with your previous average, etc. Just remember that with this approach you will need to modify your "weighting" values in your AVS Average script as you go along (.5/.5 on the merging of the first two captures; .66/.34 on the second merging; .75/.25, etc.)
- At least with my set-up, the annoying situation happens of a duplicate frame being inserted by the capture card during longer captures, about one frame every four minutes (to keep sync I assume), the specific result being two frames that look 100% identical, which means one of them needs to be deleted. I search for and remove these duplicates by hand with VirtualDub, but maybe someone here knows an automated way to achieve this? You need your capture files to be exactly the same frame-by-frame in length and arrangement for averaging to work. If you are off by even one frame (from one of the inserted 'duplicates' let's say) then you
will get ghosting, which will look worse than using a single (non-averaged) capture. This step of cleaning and trimming the captures to have them all match perfectly is the biggest time-consumer, but I still say it's all worth it in the end! :)
- I have yet to capture from a LD so I'll leave the particulars of that to others to comment on. :)
At least this is my approach. Below are screengrabs of my VirtualDub windows from an example project. Obviously no processing was done other than the averaging on the second image. Look at her cheeks and forehead. Which of these would you rather start with for all the processing still ahead on a project?
