VapourBox 0.9.13

Old footage from a VHS capture or a DVD rip shows horizontal comb lines whenever anything moves.

The proper fix is QTGMC, and the reason most people never use it is that setting it up normally means installing Python, VapourSynth and a stack of plugins that all have to match.

Download VapourBox 0.9.13 - free, 15.5 MB, Windows and macOS, with everything bundled.

What QTGMC does, in plain terms

Interlaced video stores half a picture at a time. Each frame holds the odd lines from one moment and the even lines from the next, which is why movement turns into a comb pattern on a modern screen.

Simple deinterlacers throw one half away and stretch what is left, which costs you half the detail and leaves everything soft. QTGMC rebuilds the missing lines instead, using motion analysis to work out what should have been there.

The result is the closest thing to a properly progressive version of the original, and it is why QTGMC has been the reference answer in restoration circles for over a decade.

It is slow. Expect a fraction of real time on a long capture, and treat that as the price of the quality rather than a fault.

The restoration pipeline

Deinterlacing is the first step, not the only one. VapourBox runs a multi-pass chain, and each stage targets a different flaw in old footage.

• Deinterlace - QTGMC, with all of its 70-plus parameters exposed if you want them.
• Denoise - for the grain and chroma speckle that analogue tape and early digital both produce.
• Dehalo - removes the bright outlines around edges left by over-sharpened sources.
• Deblock - softens the square artefacts of heavily compressed MPEG-2, which is most DVD material.
• Deband - fixes the stepped gradients you see in skies and fades.
• Sharpen and colour correction - the finishing pass, once the damage is gone.

Order matters, and the pipeline runs them in a sensible one by default. Sharpening before denoising, for example, sharpens the noise.

Working with it

Drop a file in and it loads. There is no project to create and no script to write.

The preview is the part that saves the most time: a side-by-side before and after that updates as you change settings, so you can judge a denoise strength in seconds instead of exporting a test clip and squinting at it.

The timeline zooms with the mouse wheel around the cursor and pans by dragging, which matters when you are hunting for the one shot where the filter falls apart. In and out markers let you export a section rather than the whole tape.

Settings save as presets, so the chain you worked out for one tape can be reused on the next twenty. If you know VapourSynth, you can add your own filters through a JSON schema rather than being limited to what ships.

During export you get the current frame rate, an estimated time remaining and a detailed log, which on a job measured in hours is not a luxury.

Field order, and why it matters

Interlaced footage stores its two half-pictures in an order: top field first or bottom field first, usually written TFF and BFF. DV and most DVD material is one, some capture cards produce the other.

Get it wrong and motion judders backwards and forwards instead of running smoothly, which is the single most common reason a deinterlace looks worse than the source.

VapourBox detects the field order automatically and lets you override it. If your output stutters oddly, flip that setting first before changing anything else.

Output formats, and which to choose

• ProRes - if the restored file is going into an editor afterwards. Large files, minimal further loss.
• H.265 - for archiving the finished result. Best size for the quality, encoded with x265.
• H.264 - for anything that has to play everywhere without thinking, through x264.

Restoration is slow, so do it once and keep the result. Our free HEVC encoder comparison covers the settings if you want to tune the archive copy, and HandBrake handles making smaller viewing copies afterwards.

Which download to take

• VapourBox-0.9.13-windows-x64.zip - the Windows build, 64-bit. It is a zip rather than an installer, so extract it and run it.
• VapourBox-0.9.13-macos-x64.dmg - the macOS build, compiled for Intel. On Apple Silicon it runs through Rosetta.

Everything is bundled, which is the whole point. No Python, no VapourSynth install, no plugin hunting.

That is also why 15.5 MB is smaller than you might expect for a tool that carries its dependencies: the heavy lifting is done by components it fetches or embeds rather than a full framework you install system-wide.

About that version number

0.9.11 is pre-1.0 software, and worth treating as such. It is usable and actively developed, but it has not had the years of edge-case grinding behind a mature release.

Keep your source files, test a chain on a short section before committing a whole tape, and check the output before you delete anything.

It is genuinely free with no paid tier, and development happens publicly on the developer's GitHub.

Who should look elsewhere

If you want AI upscaling rather than classical restoration, this is the wrong category of tool. Topaz Video AI is the paid option people usually mean when they say they want old footage "enhanced".

If you want total control, the scripting route is still the ceiling. AviSynth+ and VapourSynth scripts do everything a GUI does and everything it does not, at the cost of a learning curve measured in weekends.

If you want to edit rather than restore, use an editor. Shotcut is the easy free one and DaVinci Resolve is the professional one with a free tier.

Kdenlive sits between the two if you want something open source with a fuller timeline than Shotcut.

If you only need to cut something, restoration is overkill. LosslessCut and Avidemux both trim without re-encoding.

VirtualDub2 is the classic filter-chain tool if you want frame-level work without the VapourSynth layer.

The tell that VapourBox is right for you: your problem is the picture itself, not the length or the format of the file.

Where the footage comes from

Restoration only works on what you captured, so the source step matters more than any filter setting.

For DVDs, our MakeMKV guide covers getting the video off the disc without a re-encode, which leaves the original MPEG-2 intact for VapourBox to work on.

For tape, capture as losslessly as your card allows and restore afterwards. Every generation of compression before the restoration is damage the filters then have to guess around, and FFmpeg is the usual tool for checking what you actually captured.

More options are in Video Editors and Video Encoders.

Quick questions

Download VapourBox 0.9.13 and see how it handles your footage, or tell us how you got on if you have used it before.