Videocasette to DvD

Hey everybody,
A friend of mine has a problem and I thought maybe you could help.
He has these old videocasettes with family things on them and recently he decided to convert them to DvD. The thing is that he doesn’t get very good quality.
Does anyone have an idea on how to improve his current quality of these dvd’s that he has converted?
Greetings,
Mork
Answer #1
You don’t say what method he has used ? What format are his output files ?
Personally I have one of those old JVC triple recorders (DVD/HDD/VHS) that will copy directly with great quality.
Answer #2
How is the quality of them on the VHS player/normal viewing ? It is possible the quality is naturally bad.. it could also be poor equipment used to transfer the data.
Answer #3
So, I asked my friend and he told me that the conversion between video and dvd is pretty good. This means that what you see on the videocasettes is the same as what you see on the dvd. Now, he was wondering if it was possible to increase the quality of the dvd, knowing that the videocassettes are of pretty bad quality?
Greetings,
Mork
Answer #4
They are probably quite old VHS tapes so the quality would likely to of deteriorated quite markedly.
There are things that can be done to improve things but for best results, it’s not via one click applications.
VHS does suffer quite badly, especially as they age, from timing problems which can cause the colour and brightness information to separate. The picture can shift around horizontally also due to timing problems. Noise can also be problem.
There is no real one single thing that fits all VHS videos that I know of however for the determined many of these problems can be lessened or corrected to some degree.
I suggest that he reads these guides on Doom9 because it will give him all the information about the basics and more advanced topics. The guide is quite old so there are probably newer filters which might help more.
http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/capture/start.html
http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/capture/introduction.html
DeJitter might be useful:
http://avisynth.org/vcmohan/
search this page for VHS:
http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/External_filters
Search google for VHS avisynth.
Get AvsPmod so you can see the video as you put something together to process it so you can see what improves it.
http://www.videohelp.com/tools/AvsP
Doom9 forum will be able to offer advice, however don’t mention warez or anything like that. Keep everything sounding legal and above board. ie no cracked software.