Panasonic ES10 as passthru adds colored flicker at top of image?
 

Basically the dvd recorder I'm using as a passthru tbc, adds some kind of weird color flicker on certain clips and it is only along the first few lines. Any ideas what may cause this?

This is easy: the ES10 is not a TBC. Yes, it has some TBC-like abilities, both as line and frame, but it is very minimalist. The main strength of the ES10/15 is anti-tearing.

It also adds some artifacts to the capture, so ideally it should only be used for the anti-tearing function. If you really, really want to try and cut corners on your VHS/analog > digital workflow, you can cobble together a TBC(ish) using both ES10/15 and the DataVideo DVK units. But either DVK or ES10/15 alone is flawed, more towards "no TBC" than "with TBC".

It only works well with some narrow types of tape sources. You appear to not have one of those; most people do not.

Sample clips would help, attached to the post. But odds are it is simply lack of true TBC. I've seen this before.

Some folks are skittish about the costs of TBC, but should not be. For most folks, this will be a project purchase, not a forever purchase. Buy it, use it, resell it. I have several in the marketplace.

However, again, post the clip, let's have a look. :)

You need to upload a sample for getting useful advice. There's nothing much we can do without it. LS is right but it could also be the ES10 itself being defective.

I use the ES10 regularly in my chain with VCR's that don't have any kind of line level correction. I sometimes pair it with my TBC-1000 for dealing with really bad tapes. But the TBC-1000 isn't transparent either. Use it only when needed. Keep your chain as short as possible and only introduce new elements when needed.

Thank you all for your input.
Below I have included a small sample as requested (cropped), which showcases the problem I experience located at the upper border of my clip.

It is the golden tint flicker on the blue background which is this problem. The rest of the picture is good and not included in this cropped clip.
Open it in full screen as some players may occlude it without it.
Thank you for your help.

We see this type of top border and stains often with many capture setups. Most people clean it up during post processing. It's common, but from your lossy sample it's the least of your problems. It's highly doubtful that the rest of the image doesn't need serious work. But because your sample is so butchered, and with so little detail about how you're capturing, not much more can be said.

What does it look like without the ES10? If the video is very warped it's difficult for any device to decode the colour properly.

It doesnt happen without the ES10 in the setup.

@sanlyn how do you deduce the image is butchered? It isnt much different than the original vhs which is pretty low quality image already.

To properly diagnose, I need to see the full image frame.

sanlyn's "butchered" comment likely refers to showing only a portion of a redacted image.

What you're seeing a chroma error. It is common, and has several reasons for existing. It's an analog error, one that is due to the original tape, but which can be either reduced (sometimes removed) or amplified by the right/wrong hardware in a workflow. In most cases, the error has to be processed out using the Camcorder Color Denoise (CCD) filter in VirtualDub.

I want to see a whole frame of WITH and WITHOUT the ES10.

It looks like YV12 that was originally interlaced but is now progressive by discarding alternate fields and re-encoded to (or possibly captured to) a lossy codec that introduced compression artifacts not present in PAL analog source. Or it's possible that the source was originally progressive PAL film speeded up to 25fps and mastered as interlaced VHS. Impossible to say, but your sample is definitely not interlaced. It appears to have been cropped to mod-2 vertical dimensions, which is not allowed for YV12 interlaced video, but then again we don't know at what processing stage the sample was cropped. How much more effect the capture method and re-processing had on the video, anyone can guess. Certainly it isn't a YUY2 lossless sample. In any case, in its present state it's not suitable for cleanup work.

The split border and other effects are often seen but with so much processing going on and with no details about capture gear or method, no one could hazard a guess whether it was caused by a component in the capture chain or by the way your capture device interpreted the signal received from your tbc pass-thru. We have seen similar border noise from captures that did not use pass-thru.

If it's low quality source to begin with, why use capture methods and processing that make it look worse? On the other hand, if it's simply utilitarian material for straightforward archiving as-is, that's another story.

One time I was recording a S-VHS tape from an HDMI to S-Video adapter and the VCR recording circuit exhibited the exact same problem, pinky/greenish stain on the top, although the VCR doesn't show the problem during monitoring but when playing back the recorded tape the stains are visible, Could be your DVD recorder is behaving the same way my HDMI to S-Video box, I got a different box and the problem is gone.