I’ve recently started digitizing my mother-in-law’s collection of home movies. What I would love is some recommendations or tweaks I can do to improve the quality and remove any combing or minimize static. I am not particularly concerned with audio quality, but I’ll list it below as well.

And so far I’m enjoying the processes. It’s really fun to see old videos and to learn a bit about video formats and encoding. I’m an amateur when it comes to these kinds of things so I’m learning as I go along. Each tape I make the picture clearer and the file size smaller!

Recording

• Sony Handycam (DCR-TRV27)
• Various DV 60/90 cassette tapes
• Seemingly ran in standard recording mode (tapes are 60 minutes)

VCR

• Elgato USB Analog Video Capture Device
• Handycam’s VCR mode connected via S-Video Cable and 3.5mm audio jack*

* I have ordered a A/V to RCA cable which is the manufacturer’s recommended connection, but unsure about the effects on quality

Software

• OBS for recording the VCR feed
  • Downscale Filter: Bicubic (Sharpened scaling, 16 samples)
  • Deinterlace - Linear 2x
  • 720x540 @ 29.97 FPS (NTSC) (upscaled from 720x480)
  • “Indistinguishable Quality, Large File Size”
    • .mkv format with H.264 encoder
  • Audio Encoder AAC
  • Audio 48khz steroe
• Handbrake for re-encoding
  • 720x480 @ 29.97 FPS
  • H.264 (x264) MKV format
  • No additional deinterlacing
  • “Constant Quality” set to 20
  • Audio Encoder AAC