How to Clean Up old VHS tapes

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Permalink Reply by Mac Salcedo on April 22, 2009 at 11:03pm

There are video rewinders that has a bulit-in tape cleaners in it. However if the VHS tape is really that dirty you have to open it up and manually clean it with cotton

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Permalink Reply by peter on April 23, 2009 at 6:19am

Thanks but I was more interested in how to restore old video from the aging tape using filters in Final Cut Pro.
If its possible?

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Permalink Reply by Shane Killian on April 23, 2009 at 10:18am

I've found that if you can get multiple copies of it, you can precisely overlay them and cut down a lot of the artifacts. Depending on what the video is, some home movies have several copies held by different family members. The different tapes will have artifacts in different ways, so unlike a lot of filters, you're actually adding video information back in instead of trying to cover up the artifacts.

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Permalink Reply by R. Bruce Perry on June 9, 2009 at 7:59pm

try using Color. The software is really nice in doing some preliminary clean up particularly re-coloring and sharpening a little. It depends a lot on how much time and effort you want to go to to restore. FCP/Color can do a lot to improve bad VHS. But to make it "archival" quality, you're going to need much more, depending on what condition it's in.

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Permalink Reply by Dreams Creation Video Production on June 10, 2009 at 3:19pm

I just found this post on creativecow, it might help http://forums.creativecow.net/archivepost/8/412666

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Permalink Reply by Sam on June 10, 2009 at 3:38pm

One simple trick you can use to fool the eye is just to give the footage a slight letterbox effect to a black edge. You'll be surprised how much that one crisp line along the edge gives the illusion of a better quality picture all round.

Another slightly more nutty but quite effective idea, depending on what sort of project it is, is to find an old tv from the era that matches the vhs, play the vhs on the tv and video it with a modern camera. They did this on a recent Brian Clough documentary on ITV and it looked very stylish.

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