VHS hiss

I am in the process of tranferring all of my VHS tapes to digital copies (DivX/XviD).
I am playing the tapes on my VCR and capturing them to my computer on a Pinnacle DV500 video capture card. Video and audio are encoding just fine, although I can't seem to get the video compressed as small as I would like and yet keep good quality like several of the subbing groups :)

My only issue is that I can hear a low hiss in the audio track. I have been told that this is due to the analog nature of VHS tapes. Is there some way to reliably remove the low hiss before I make a final encoding?

have you tried to transfer the video with svideo cable or better video cable...


to fix the prob, I only can suggest the use of a video editor like soundforge or another prgm able to edit the audio track...

maY i suggest that you use a wave editor.... such as- soud forge, cooledit wave lbs etc. these programs are designed to treat audio, you can select the frequancy the hiss is at and remove it cleaning up the audio.
the down side is you need to seperate the audio from the vidieo and process each tape seperatly (but keeping the samesettings!)
if you want to do it properly i suggest doing that.

most video programs do support limmited sound editing but i am not sure as to how effective they are.

As for the divx compression try using VBR and Double pass this will enable best visual but as for the size that depends on the type of vidieo as to how big the file may be.... (some pictures are easer to encode) ie -more fast action and quick sceen changes will tend to give give you larger files.

Thanks for the help!

One more note: I've used a program called Goldwave (.com) for years now in converting VHS and cassettes to digital audio. The noise reduction filter is (generally) amazing at removing hiss! Hit and miss, but you can try the demo on their website. Not as slick as Soundforge maybe, but those Canadians made a damned good program! (and cheap too!)