VHS Imported Footage: Is There a Way to Get Rid of Those Blue-Green Ribbons?

Firstly, thanks for the reply! Always nice to know I'm not yelling into a void. 🙂

I'm using the capture device that came with EASY VHS to DVD (Roxio) because their software was anything BUT easy, but the capture device seems to work just fine. I'm not sure getting a better device would help, this being 20+ year-old VHS tape and all.

No, not the black. I'm old enough to remember the old square frame, so that's nothing suprising. I'm talking about how sometimes, on VHS, you get a blue-green thing that looks kinda like the Northern Lights, LOL, swimming inconsistently through usually the top, but occasionally the bottom, of the frame. 

The other thing is the bad tracking that gets better, but doesn't disappear, when I adjust the playback on the VHS unit (it may vary with units, and I have 3, but I'm not dragging another one out of the top of the closet unless I have to, and I don't think it'll eliminate it entirely, anyway).

Is there a way to get a screen capture in PE? I could (theoretically) show you what I mean.

Here's the thing: I know this software is capable of all kinds of things I would never have been able to do "the old fashioned way," like color and lighting adjustment, for example, and probably some of those hokey wipes and such. The majority of which I'll never use for my purposes, and that's fine. 

Right now I am learning, and I'm using VHS tapes of an old TV show (one that cannot, incidentally, be purchased anywhere for any amount of money, probably due to a rights issue, which eventually may be resolved) as something relatively easy to work on (easy to find commercials to cut out, to practice that kind of editing, then I want to figure out how to do a plain-but-decent menu on a DVD). (The bulk of stuff I want to transfer is figure skating, much of which was recorded in the rink by me and a fellow skater, so one-of-a-kind, but also complex.)

In any case, since I'm doing the TV show as an exercise, I want to learn the best way, but also, I might as well be able to watch it in the end. If there's a way to fix that stuff, I'd like to; if not, not the end of the world. It's watchable, just annoying. What I don't want to do is transfer it, THEN find out that I could have fixed those things, but by then the tapes are gone (this applies to the skating as well; I don't want to have to schlep them next time I move!) and so I'm stuck with aurorae borealis for ever and ever.

Thoughts? Advice? 

You don't say how you're digitizing your video and with what device. But if you're capturing over a USB connection, you pretty get what you see. You can do a lot to tune in the picture.

As for that noise you get around the edges of your video frame, they're just artifacts from the pre-digital age. 20 years ago, TVs didn't show those edges. There's not a lot you can do to get rid of them aside from enlarging your video in the frame.

Are those the ribbons you're talking about?