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  #1  
07-02-2015, 01:22 PM
Motleymongoose Motleymongoose is offline
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I have been attempting to capture my S-VHS home videos to digital for about the last ten years with less than satisfying results. I started with old the equipment that I had on hand. I went from a sub par VHS recorder through a Diamond VC500 capture device. Other than the quality being absolutely terrible from the old VCR, I learned the importance of TBC.

I bought a used JVC HR-S7800U VCR that has TBC capabilities. Wow! what a difference. I also invested in an ADVC-300 TBC device.

The first attempt was VCR > ADVC-300 > Canon HV30 (via AV cable) > miniDV Tape > (via firewire) Capture to FCPX. I believe that due to the Canon HV30 up scaling the video from the original 640X480 to a 720X480 resolution that it looked terrible. Pixalated to the max.

The next attempt was VCR > ADVC-300 > Diamond VC500 > USB Capture to the hard drive with Video Glide (Software included with device). Better but not what I think I can get. I say this because if I play the video from the VCR directly to the TV, it looks substantially better than what I am capturing.

I have tried ProRes422, Uncompressed 10 bit 4:2:2, MP4 (I don't know what codec it uses for this setting.) and others. I also tried 640X480 and "Half Size" resolutions to see if that would help with the pixalation. No improvement. There is a long list of different settings. I have no idea which are better than others for this scenario. There are also various settings that can be adjusted to further refine the capture. I need to learn more about what each does before I would even attempt to use settings other than what are the defaults. I am convinced that they will help and I am hoping to be able to gather that knowledge from this site at a later date.

The goal is to produce something that can be played on various devices without any substantial editing. I know that some post production would be required. The material that I have captured definitely fits into the garbage in garbage out statement. I know I can do better. If I can pull the footage into FCPX and use clips etc., that would be a bonus.

What I gather from this site, I would be better off with some sort of capture card (preferably ATI) and virtualdub. I have a windows computer but I would like to be able to use my Mac with the equipment that I have if it is possible to get equal results. So, the question is, "Will what I have produce decent results?" Provided I can figure out how to tweak things. I understand that I am simplifying a very complex question. Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Motleymongoose
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  #2  
07-02-2015, 08:35 PM
premiumcapture premiumcapture is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Motleymongoose View Post
I have been attempting to capture my S-VHS home videos to digital for about the last ten years with less than satisfying results. I started with old the equipment that I had on hand. I went from a sub par VHS recorder through a Diamond VC500 capture device. Other than the quality being absolutely terrible from the old VCR, I learned the importance of TBC.

I bought a used JVC HR-S7800U VCR that has TBC capabilities. Wow! what a difference. I also invested in an ADVC-300 TBC device.

The first attempt was VCR > ADVC-300 > Canon HV30 (via AV cable) > miniDV Tape > (via firewire) Capture to FCPX. I believe that due to the Canon HV30 up scaling the video from the original 640X480 to a 720X480 resolution that it looked terrible. Pixalated to the max.

The next attempt was VCR > ADVC-300 > Diamond VC500 > USB Capture to the hard drive with Video Glide (Software included with device). Better but not what I think I can get. I say this because if I play the video from the VCR directly to the TV, it looks substantially better than what I am capturing.

I have tried ProRes422, Uncompressed 10 bit 4:2:2, MP4 (I don't know what codec it uses for this setting.) and others. I also tried 640X480 and "Half Size" resolutions to see if that would help with the pixalation. No improvement. There is a long list of different settings. I have no idea which are better than others for this scenario. There are also various settings that can be adjusted to further refine the capture. I need to learn more about what each does before I would even attempt to use settings other than what are the defaults. I am convinced that they will help and I am hoping to be able to gather that knowledge from this site at a later date.

The goal is to produce something that can be played on various devices without any substantial editing. I know that some post production would be required. The material that I have captured definitely fits into the garbage in garbage out statement. I know I can do better. If I can pull the footage into FCPX and use clips etc., that would be a bonus.

What I gather from this site, I would be better off with some sort of capture card (preferably ATI) and virtualdub. I have a windows computer but I would like to be able to use my Mac with the equipment that I have if it is possible to get equal results. So, the question is, "Will what I have produce decent results?" Provided I can figure out how to tweak things. I understand that I am simplifying a very complex question. Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Motleymongoose
Avoid DV if you can - it does not reencode well, and this likely the culprit of many Mac issues. It is good and still in use for SD video recording, but due to the 4:1:1 color scheme it tends to turn into crap fairly quickly, especially when dealing with VHS.

I would recommend going straight to the VC500 - the ADVC300 has a line corrector that will straighten the video, but your VCR is already doing this. It is not adding the frame synchronizing benefit that a device such as a TBC-1000 would add. You are losing a lot of quality by putting it through the Canopus. You can capture straight to FCP X with the ADVC300 if I am not mistaken, which I recommend you try. I have done it in Mavericks with the ADVC 110.

FCP X is fine for what you want to do with editing and encoding. I find that encoding in FCP X can be faster than compressor depending on your project.

My general Mac blurb:
I found that running bootcamp and capturing to windows gave me a lot more options. If your current Windows PC has higher specs, use that and capture to a good format like Huffyuv or Lagarith. From there, you can pull it into FCP X by converting it either to ProRes or uncompressed (better but longer and more storage required @ 70GB/hour). The uncompressed format that FCP X is very specific, so you can skip some extra work by going to ProRes but you will lose some quality.

I have found being someone who uses both systems in parallel that FCP X is good for color correction and certain encoding but most filtering and changes should happen in Windows.

There is some good Mac hardware out there in the $1k range, but the Blackmagic cards and devices have serious QC issues.
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  #3  
07-04-2015, 02:42 PM
msgohan msgohan is offline
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You shouldn't be experiencing pixellation.
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07-24-2015, 11:46 AM
Motleymongoose Motleymongoose is offline
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I did not know that finalcut would handle uncompressed video. I thought I converted everything to prores by default. Are there any special steps that need to be performed during import to maintain the uncompressed format?
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07-26-2015, 11:16 AM
premiumcapture premiumcapture is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Motleymongoose View Post
I did not know that finalcut would handle uncompressed video. I thought I converted everything to prores by default. Are there any special steps that need to be performed during import to maintain the uncompressed format?
When you have a new project or library set up, it will read the device like a DV camcorder and pull video accordingly. It will save it as a DV file, not as anything else in an 'original media' folder. This is the video straight from the Canopus. From there, depending on whether you selected ProRes or Uncompressed as your editing medium, it will recompress from there. ProRes is pretty good for editing but with SD I lean towards uncompressed as there is a small difference.
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  #6  
06-20-2016, 02:36 PM
Turmoil Turmoil is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by premiumcapture View Post
Avoid DV if you can - it does not reencode well, and this likely the culprit of many Mac issues. It is good and still in use for SD video recording, but due to the 4:1:1 color scheme it tends to turn into crap fairly quickly, especially when dealing with VHS.

...
Did you ever happen to notice, that DV files stored in the iMovie project folder/package are DV and those DVs that you create via "export -> quighest quality" are reported as DVCpro by Mediainfo?

I let someone compare those files and he said:
Quote:
The "capture" (DV) and "pass-through" ('DVCPro') samples are bit identical. What's more, both have 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, which is interesting, as by definition DVCPro(25) is 4:1:1.

So why MediaInfo reports the export file as being "DVCPro" (Commercial Name), I really not sure.

Regardless, I think it's safe to conclude that it is a direct stream copy of the source DV. DV is not a lossless format, and if there was re-encoding going-on, you would expect to pick up some loss in quality on metric analysis. And there is none.

That basic question answered, what might be interesting to determine is whether iMovie truly supports so called "Smart Rendering" of DV, which most Windows-based NLE's do, by default or as an option. By that I mean, if an "effect" is applied to a section of a clip on the timeline, only those frames changed by the effect are re-encoded and the "untouched" frames are passed through (copied). So if only cut edits are applied, there is no re-encoding at all.
PS: it also seems to me exporting from iMovie (I am always talking about iMovieHD6 and prior!) as "passthrough" takes longer than with mpegstreamclip.

Any thoughts?

PPS: Oh and I am talking about PAL VHS that had been captured via ADVC-300 over Firewire to (iMovie3), 5 and 6. Not sure, if I discoverd that with vers3, too. Could the strange behaviour the dvcpro25 4:2:0 be a result of a badly implemented PAL conversion in iMovie? (It being an American app handling European stuff).

Also another observation, if you open iM-3 projects in iM-6 a bit of the begining and the end (seconds) is lost. You first have to open those in iM5 and save them and then they can be opened with no loss in iM-6.

Last edited by Turmoil; 06-20-2016 at 02:48 PM.
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  #7  
06-22-2016, 04:03 PM
Turmoil Turmoil is offline
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Is it better I start a new thread? I thought it would perfectly fit the topic and also I am referring to a certain post here.
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