I’ve been digitizing a bunch of old family movies recently. You know, the ones from the 90s and early 2000s recorded on tape. But every time I played them on my computer, I noticed this weird “comb” effect around moving objects. It was like horizontal jagged lines flickering everywhere. 
It drove me crazy. It made the footage look low-quality and gave me a bit of a headache. I did some research and found out it’s called “interlacing.” Apparently, old TVs displayed video differently than our modern monitors do.
I tried a few free players like VLC, which let me watch the video without lines by deinterlacing on the fly, but the file itself was still messy. If I wanted to upload it to YouTube for my family to see, I needed to actually fix the file.
That’s when I decided to try a dedicated tool. I used HitPaw Video Enhancer because I heard it uses AI to handle these issues better than standard converters. I was skeptical—would it just blur the lines away and make the video look soft ?
I imported one of the worst tapes, a birthday party where the kids were running around (lots of motion). I selected the AI model and let it run. When I played the result back, I was shocked. Not only were the jagged lines completely gone, but the video actually looked sharper than the original. The AI had filled in the details rather than just smudging the m.
I compared it to HandBrake, which is the standard free recommendation. HandBrake did a decent job removing the lines, but the image was definitely softer. HitPaw felt like it restored the video to what it was supposed to look li ke.
Now, I’m working my way through the whole collection. It’s so satisfying to take footage that looked “old tech” and turn it into something crisp that looks great on a 4K TV. If you have old tapes or files that look jagged, do yourself a favor and deinterlace them. It makes a world of differe nce.