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Upscaling old VHS & DVD videos

Old home videos are interlaced, noisy and 4:3. Doing the steps in the right order matters more than which software you use.

  1. Capture well. Use a decent VCR with a TBC (time-base corrector) and capture losslessly at 720 × 576 (PAL) or 720 × 480 (NTSC).
  2. Deinterlace first. Use a motion-adaptive deinterlacer (bwdif or QTGMC) and output 50/60 fps to keep motion smooth.
  3. Denoise gently. Tape noise confuses upscalers; a light temporal denoise helps.
  4. Fix the aspect ratio. DV and DVD pixels are not square. Convert to 768 × 576 or 640 × 480 square pixels before upscaling.
  5. Upscale. Going 2× to around 1440 × 1080 (4:3) is a natural target; AI upscalers recover faces and edges far better than a resize.
  6. Keep it 4:3. Pillarbox instead of stretching or cropping to 16:9.

Steps 2–4 can be done for free with FFmpeg. The command generator has deinterlace and denoise switches.