If you have captured to MPEG2 already, and no longer have the original tapes, you have crippled, to some degree, your best ability to repair-restore the video. Using a good VCR with S-video is greatly preferred, and if it has a built-in line TBC it's even better.
Consumer analog video is best captured using a lossless AVI codec, interlaced, and a 4:2:2 color YUV space, at 720x480.
Because PD cannot do that I use a third-party freeware to capture and avoid an entire round of heavy MPEG compression.
However, you have what you have and we need to work with that and live with the second round of video compression.
In addition to the in-house PD filters, New Blue and Boris have decent filters to minimize grain, sharpen, and of course fix colors, white balance and stabilize, and cuts.
Each will be working on an already compressed video so you might consider less-is-more approach.
In the end, do not expand the video to avoid the overscan (on the bottom), and nasty edges, that will simply degrade the image even more. Use a mask to tweak the edges, be sure to keep the mask centered.
If any tapes have video content flagging or bending at the top of the image, you have 3 choices, mask it, which loses a big portion of the video, expand it out of the frame, also losing image quality, or leave it.
The only way to remove the flagging is to recapture using a Panasonic ES-10, or 15 (some say the ES-20 also has some of this ability but don't bank on it) as a pass-through pseudo Time Base Corrector that magically removes that flagging. You'll need the Panny remote to shut off noise reduction as it is too strong.
If you recapture in PD, bump up the bit rate from 8000 to 12000 to minimize compression artifacts, but it's still not as good as lossless capture using VirtualDub 1.911 and Huffyuv codec.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at Dec 23. 2020 22:51
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