I found some old Video8 tapes I made 20 years ago while in Russia. I’m slowly sucking them onto my Mac at the rate of 1 minute per minute. The picture quality isn’t bad, but by today’s standards it seems pretty rough. Ropey is a good word.

That said, when I bought the camera 20 years ago it was a pretty good camera - bordering on what we’d call “prosumer” today. It cost me the best part of a month and a half’s pay, and has features which I feel I’ve only just got back with my last video camera purchase (manual zoom, proper manual focussing - no intermediary servos controlling these things).

The question is about cleaning up the video. Yes, I know it’s going to be poor by today’s standards, and the software I’m importing it with will have compressed it (I’m using the highest settings). However, any suggestions for cleaning up the video - reducing blurring and smearing, interlacing and booting the colour a bit would be welcome. I’m using Final Cut Express for video editing these days. I’m not looking to purchase plug ins for this, more looking for techniques based on what the software can do.

The video in question is from a trip to pre Capitalist Russia in 1990. I’ll be posting snippets on YouTube while I edit the thing for myself and the friend I travelled with. I’m glad I found the tapes. I thought they were lost, so I’m digitising them.

Don't do it! The PQ of VHS will add to the charm!

The only thing I'd tackle is the interlacing; there's no need for people to see combing or smudging. Be sure to capture it at the native PAL resolutions.

Here’s a snippet - changing of the guard by Lenin’s Tomb.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hhnL6IR ... ideo_title

I’ve got a USB widget that connects to the video camera using the video out sockets. Sadly, it squirts out MPEG 2 files, which aren’t too bad. I don’t think, TBH, it will get much better. Late 1980s hardware, analogue, old tapes.

Nowe HERE’s something interesting. I have been sampling the videos using some Roxio lead - basically phono jacks to USB. I get a pretty munged MPEG stream out of it. It’s OK, but a bit blocky in places. I have just tried an experiment. I wondered if I could connect the video camera using the firewire plug to my Mac and use iMovie to import the video instead. Theory here being that I’d get a much better base level sample than the MPEG output. iMovie would give essentially me a DV stream to work from.

My guess was that it would not work. I was wrong. I’ve got a small clip from the first tape in iMovie, and Final Cut Express can read it. I’m really liking this, and I’ll be resampling the tapes using this method.

Effectively - I’m importing video recorded on purely analogue kit using my old digital 8 video camera as an analogue to digital converter.

Sony kit isn’t always crap

reminds me of a mr bean episode