HQ conversion of S-VHS/VHS, HI8/8, miniDV to digiital - equipment and steps
 

Hello to everyone!

I really must thank you all for giving precious advices, especially LordSmurf and his colleagues. I am still learning on how to convert and save VHS, Hi8 and miniDV cassettes for my sons and their families one day, into digital format. I live in Italy, so it is not always easy to get all the equipment that you mention in your threads as sometimes you refer to the material intended only for USA market.

What I did until now is start purchasing the

EQUIPMENT

1) I ordered Panasonic-NV-HS1000 (eBay Germany) as my Bang & Olufsen VX5000 plays very badly (in B/W and with a lot of errors and differently every time) perfectly good VHS cassettes. All my cassettes are of a high and pro quality and almost unused as I made copies to store them. I hope this “new” machine will be in order. NV-HS1000 is quite expensive here, USD 450-1.000 if they are in good condition.

2) I have also ordered ATI All-In-Wonder 9600 (eBay USA) as I do have an old P4 computer with AGP slots. On my main machine, I have AGP free slot as well. The "big" machine is a 4x4 Xeon W5580 workstation with Intel chipset 5520 (DELL Precision T7500), 64 GB of RAM, nVidia Quadro FX4800, Creative SB X-Fi (and another one that is HD Audio installed on the MB). This machine is from Jan 2010 and it works great as I do take regular care of it. The OS presently installed is W10 Enterprise x64 on a 256GB Samsung SSD. Other HDD is 600 GB Seagate SAS SCSI + a bunch of other HDD ( 16 TB) for backup and work attached. I DO NOT WANT TO TOUCH THIS CONFIGURATION, but I plan to install WXP x86 on a HDD and run it on the same machine separately from the present configuration.
I have also the IEEE 1394 (Firewire) 6 pin on that machine to connect MiniDV for transfer.

3) Said that… and what LodrSmurf explained in many occasions, I have to go further now. Question is how? No TBC available of those mentioned by you guys. No AVToolbox AVT-8710 or Cypress CTB-100, DataVideo TBC-1000, TBC-2000, TBC-3000, TBC-4000, TBC-100. Noting available. I was thinking about Canopus until I found you guys here. Especially LordSmurf has it against them. So I listen and that is out of question. WHAT AND WHERE TO BUY? If I got it right , I must have an external TBC.

LordSmurf if you have something ready to sell I am interested.

THE PROCESS OF CONVERSION

4.1) For the VHS conversion I intend to use the following setup:
A) NV-HS1000
B) TBC (what to buy???, whatever you mentioned is not available any more)
C) WXP SP2 on the a/m workstation
D) HuffYUV + VirtualDUB
E) RESULT - Most probably AVI format if I manage to get it right (it is to be tried first and understood – did not come to that yet and must say that I feel like an idiot, but hopefully I will come to it).

4.2) For the conversion of Hi8, I intend to change just the letter A):
A) I thought I was OK, but my Sony Handycam CCD-TR705E does play, but I cannot see anything in the viewfinder while playing (just snow), so probably I will have to buy something to play the 8 and Hi8 cassettes. I am thinking of buying Sony EV-S9000. What do you think?
Other passes as above.

4.3) For the conversion of MiniDV, I also intend to change just the letter A):
A) Thank God, my Sony DCR-PC110E, still works perfectly and (at least in the viewfinder) I get a perfect picture. An option is to go also for a combined pro JVC VS30, that I found new/unused on the internet.

5) My questions are simple. Answers might be less simple. HAHAHA.
- Do you approve my strategy, steps and equipment?
- Where to buy a good not price killing TBC? And what to buy? Is there something else that can replace it?
- Do you approve the workstation for the conversion under WXP SP2 (maybe I would also need to change the audio card, but I am not sure which)?
- Is it ok to “catch” the analog material on the HDD/SSD and work from there in the editing software? I basically think I will transfer everything raw as shoot to quality BDs from the HDD and keep the copies on the HDD for editing (for example in PremierePro).

Many thanks in advance for any comments.

Sanlyn I followed your advice.

All of the tape formats you mention are analog source except MiniDV. MiniDV is digital.

MiniDV is not "captured". It is copied 1:1 via Firewire using WinDV in WindowsXP. The copy operation makes a true 1:1 digital copy from MiniDV tape to DV-AVI format. This is a lossy format that was not designed for filtering or other cleanuip without serious damage. Dv must be decoded to lossless YV12 for filtering and any other image modification work, to prevent further degradation to the video during post-processing. Edit as lossless video in the software of your choice, but keep it lossless until time for the final encoding to the output format you desire. Lossless YV12 can be losslessly compressed with the Lagarith codec. You cannot use huffyuv for YV12 video. Huffyuv uses YUY2 or RGB only. Lagarith can use YV12, YUY2, and RGB. https://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html . Lagarith is also used to losslessly compress intermediate working files between processing steps. It makes slightly smaller lossless files than huffyuv but isn't normally used for capture because it is somewhat more CPU-intensive than Huffyuv for capture.

If you don't like Lagarith you can use the lossless UT Video Codec suite. Be advised that many media players can't read the UT codec.

All of the other tape formats you mention are analog tapes. Capture to YUY2 720x576 (PAL) lossless AVI via VirtualDub using Huffyuv lossless compression. Later processing steps can use Lagarith compression to save intermediate working files. Intermediate working files are generally discarded after the project is completed.

You can get an external TBC with excellent line-level and very good frame-level tbc by using a pass-thru device. The pass-thru recommended is a Panasonic DMR-ES10 or DMR-ES15 DVD recorder (PAL version for your country), whose cost is far less than the TBC's you mentioned. You will need the Panasonic remote to disable the Panasonic's noise reduction, which causes posterizing effects if turned on. Very good tbc circuitry when used as a pass-thru device. Connect the VCR to the pass-thru's input, connect the pass-thru's output to your capture device. Note that a pass-thru tbc will correct frame timing but will not defeat Macrovision copy protection.

Premiere can be used for lossless cut and join editing and for encoding. but it is an editor, not a restoration or repair tool. it can't be used for cropping or some other image modification jobs, has poor deinterlacing, poor resizing, poor reinterlacing, poor color conversion with some colorspaces, and no decent noise filtering. Can be used for color correction with lossless media using very advanced color tools, some of which are replicated in Virtualdub. Premiere has decent MPEG and h264 encoding, which would be the last step in any processing workflow.

The primary denoising, restoration, and modification tools are Avisynth and VirtualDub. These are free. NLE editors are not restoration programs.

No one recommends capturing MiniDv or analog tape to BD format. BluRay is a very lossy final delivery format not designed or suitable for modification or editing after it is encoded. If you want BluRay, filter and edit your lossless captures and AVI transfers and encode them properly with Premier after cleanup and restoration. Resizing standard definition for HD BluRay dimensions is not recommended. It is a complete waste of time that does not improve the original -- in fact, it will make it a look worse. The BluRay specification includes standard definition video for 4:3 and 16:9 video, very similar to DVD. It uses the same frame size as PAL DVD. Let your players and TV upscale your standard definition videos for viewing on your TV -- your players and TV can do much better upscaling work than you can do with software.

Huffyuv, Lagarith or UT Video codecs, VirtualDub and its filters, and Avisynth and its filters are employed as 32-bit software. You cannot mix 32-bit and 64-bit filters and codecs with 32-bit programs.

Thank you really very much for this explanation. Many things are clearer now. Just to clarify. I, of course new that MiniDV is digital and copied. I was not clear in my earlier post about that. But what you explained with regard to the encoding, that I did not know and it is great that you explained which encoding to use and how.

The purpose of all this work is to save videos from degrading of cassettes and be able to watch (only my own recorded videos, nothing protected). Among VHS, Hi8 and MiniDv, I have surely some 300-400 hours of material, maybe more.

When I mentioned BD, I mentioned it as a memorising media (100 GB and above, maybe even M-Disc) of the captured, copied and then lossless encoded material, not as intention to encode the material to that format. So there I was not precise about my intention.

Raw lossless video to HDD, copy of that to optical media (BD, M-disc), editing from the HDD, final results for watching (with copies to optical media of that too). HDD/SSD is great. Might fail. Optical disk of high quality is for longer keeping, presuming that there will still be optical readers in the future, that might disappear like VHS and cassettes did. Let’s hope not. And it is a different technology. So hopefully back-compatible even in the future.

Question 1 - how much GB of lossless YV12 corresponds to 1 hour of MiniDV video? And the same for huffyuv with regard to VHS and Hi8/8? You certainly have the experience here.

Question 2 - there is this machine, that I can get unused and it looks quite interesting http://pro.jvc.com/prof/attributes/t...&feature_id=02. JVC talks in their brochure about the IEEE 1394 that the machines has and refers, I quote: ”IN/OUT S-VHS/VHS or DV decks”. Does that mean that you can “copy” VHS to HDD (some internal conversion/encoding?)”. Ever heard of this?

And the last, but not least. If I understood correctly, you say to use Panasonic DMR-ES10 or DMR-ES15 as a pass-through device instead of TBC that I have mentioned. Intelligent and savvy idea, which I really like and would like to adopt, as it will make my life much easier.

But if I already have a TBC in the VHS (JVC SR-VS30, Panasonic HS-1000, Panasonic AG-4700, or similar), could I have some loss of quality because of the cables, connections etc.? I believe I read that S-video gives a better quality then coax (Y) connection. It might look as a stupid question, as you could say: “You have the same thing with TBC. It is a pass-through device.” But TBC is supposed to have separate S-video IN/OUT. DMR-ES15 has only one I/O connection, so I cannot use separate IN/OUT S-video connections. Does this makes any sense to you?

Under question 1, instead of YV12, I meant Lagarith. Sorry. :)

Forget my last question about connections on DSR-ES15 (did not know the product). Just have seen that it has a separate S-video IN/OUT and composite as well. It is not seen from the photos until the front is not open so I looked for the specifications. It even has an IEEE 1394 in front and component video IN at the back. So all clear now.

Understood.
Most users save capture archives to external USB drives. Some use both HDD and optical disc.

Approximate figures:
YV12 Lagarith = 20 to 25 GB/hr (lossless 4:2:0 color)
YV12 DV = 12 GB/hr (lossy 4.2.0 color)
YUY2 huffyuv = 28 GB/hr (lossless 4.2.2 color)

YUY2 has twice the chroma resolution of YV12, requires more data bits than YV12

VCRs have line-level TBCs only. They do not have frame-sync tbc's. A pass-thru has both line-level and frame-sync tbc's. The two types of tbc address different problems. The extra cable connection won't matter.

ES10/ES15 has component OUT, not component IN. Also has very clean composite-to-s-video conversion and a good y/c comb filter.

Thanks again for the data size infomration. It will be quite a lot of data for all my videos. I will need more discs.
In the spec. that I got it said that ES15 has a component out, but that may be the error. You surely know better. However, if I connect composite IN to S-video OUT, I shall be fine, right?

Connect the composite from the playback source to any composite INPUT on the ES15. Select that input in the ES15 input menu. Then connect the s-video OUTPUT to your capture device. The ES10 and ES15 have clean composite-to-s-video conversion and effective 3D comb filters to reduce dot crawl from composite sources.

Will do as suggested Sanlyn. Thank you very much for helping out.