And I'd like to see a comparison between ATI 600/AIW + TBC1000 versus BrightEye 75!
BrightEye 75 is no different from any classic USB capture device from the era, they were made at the time where analog video was mass consumed and digital started to dominate the broadcasting business so they felt the need to migrate the contents to digital, It differs from a consumer capture device that it captures to SDI instead of USB because it was used to capture to tape based lossless SD digital formats such as digibeta, The files are exactly the ones you would get from a USB capture device in lossless mode. For a long time SDI data was only possible to be transferred to computer via SDI PCI cards (Impossible thru USB 2.0 and barely thru firewire), but now with USB 3.0 it is possible by using a SDI to USB 3.0 adapter to use such capture equipment with laptops and all in ones.
What worries me is these easycraps, composite to HDMI boxes and the likes of intensity shuttle.
BrightEye 75 is no different from any classic USB capture device from the era, they were made at the time where analog video was mass consumed and digital started to dominate the broadcasting business so they felt the need to migrate the contents to digital, It differs from a consumer capture device that it captures to SDI instead of USB because it was used to capture to tape based lossless SD digital formats such as digibeta, The files are exactly the ones you would get from a USB capture device in lossless mode. For a long time SDI data was only possible to be transferred to computer via SDI PCI cards (Impossible thru USB 2.0 and barely thru firewire), but now with USB 3.0 it is possible by using a SDI to USB 3.0 adapter to use such capture equipment with laptops and all in ones.
What worries me is these easycraps, composite to HDMI boxes and the likes of intensity shuttle.
Oh I forgot, the other difference is that it is built in TBC/frame sync already that saves few hundred dollars, here is a copy from the email I received from the manufacturer design engineer:
Quote:
The BrightEye 75 is a Time Base Corrector, combined with a frame synchronizer. And it includes analog audio inputs which are digitized at 48Khz to a resolution of 24 bits per channel (professional standard). That audio is embedded in the final SDI output.
The time base correction is performed through a proprietary system that digitally tracks the incoming signal. It is much more sophisticated than a conventional line rate process, as it also provides velocity compensation, which makes it ideal to process the output of a VHS helical scan player. In addition to the TBC functions, the signal digitizer features oversampling and greater bit depth than traditional TBCs.
The Frame Synchronizer that follows the TBC function is a traditional implementation that uses frame drop and double to accommodate the difference between input and output frame rates. It is frame based, not field based.
Regards,
David Wood
++++++++
David Wood
President and Chief Design Engineer
Ensemble Designs
And it includes analog audio inputs which are digitized at 48Khz to a resolution of 24 bits per channel (professional standard).
I wonder if that 24 bits of dynamic range reduces the need to check and adjust sound levels before capture?
Quote:
The time base correction...provides velocity compensation, which makes it ideal to process the output of a VHS helical scan player.
If would be good to see how well it can compensate for stretched tapes.
Quote:
In addition to the TBC functions, the signal digitizer features oversampling and greater bit depth than traditional TBCs.
I wonder if this reduces the need to check your histogram before capture? A good test would be a tape with too much dynamic range in a single scene (shooting indoors out through a window, etc.), then try to pull information from the bright and dark areas at the same time.
So there's potential to make video capture a little more idiot-proof, and if true, I think there's a lot of value in that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by latreche34
Now that I'm back home I can share samples of my work flow, The samples are the final lossy product that the customer wants, Lossless looked better before de-interlacing and encoding, They could be cleaned up further if requested:
The VHS footage should have been detelecined instead of deinterlaced, and why is the ABCNewsWeather footage 30p with every frame duplicated into 60p? Is it a limitation of the BrightEye, similar to the HDMI solution?
The BE 75 has an audio gain adjustment for both audio channels anyway, I will post screen shots of all its settings when I get home. I don't know how to telecine, but the footage plays fine, as to 30p and 60p I don't know what are you viewing the spec with, But I used QTGMC to deinterlace and ffmpeg to convert to mp4, The bright eye has nothing to do with de-interlacing, it just captures lossless interlaced footage.
Since it outputs 486 lines instead of 480, when you capture VHS, do you get 6 lines of actual video picture at the top, or 6 lines of black, or some combination of the two?
Since it outputs 486 lines instead of 480, when you capture VHS, do you get 6 lines of actual video picture at the top, or 6 lines of black, or some combination of the two?
All, neither, or a mix. It varies by tape, and by VCR.
There is always extra lines of head switch, blanking signals and other data if available as LS mentioned and they are always greater than 6 lines, So trimming those extra lines off helps getting rid of most of that junk without cutting into the active video area. Consumer capture cards however do capture at 480 so you will have to live with that noise or mask it with black bands because you can't crop it.
I've also started to crop down the horizontal resolution to 704 since it's considered legal, that also took care of the useless padded 16 pixels (8 on each side) that was added in the ITU-Rec 601 (CCIR-601 or D1) standards and was adopted by all capture cards, That leaves a clean frame of 704x480 with 95% or so of active video, then I just add the 4:3 aspect ratio flag to the encoded file and wala.
Here is a snap shot (no aspect ratio set):
Last edited by latreche34; 05-18-2020 at 01:30 AM.
It's spelled "viola". Pronounced "vwala". It's French ("voilà").
I learned that from Archie comics about 30 years ago. I kept wondering what the characters were saying, so I looked it up. Still no idea why it was used so much in the books back then. Seriously, it seemed like at least once per digest issue. I forget which character used it most. Maybe Mr. Lodge?.
I do fully speak French and while it's spelled voila in French it's totally pronounced wala in the above purpose which means "there it is or there you go"
The following users thank latreche34 for this useful post:
lordsmurf (05-18-2020),
msgohan (05-07-2022)
I do fully speak French and while it's spelled voila in French it's totally pronounced wala in the above purpose which means "there it is or there you go"
Well, viola!
(It's actually a somewhat interesting linguistics discussion on a few sites, something I never knew. This was interesting: "My best guess on the v > w change is that the w in the French [vwala] weakens the v to the point where it may be more like a beta, and then the process continues to drop the v entirely." So both "vwala" and "wala" are accepted, and likely regional dialect based.)
Yes in most cases is Vwala such as: Le Voila - There he is, or: La Voila - There she is, but when you want to say like "here", or "here you go" it is just pronounced wala.
I just want to add a quick note about where the 486 lines come from for NTSC standard.
The NTSC TV standard uses 525 scan lines per frame for both the odd and even fields, Vertical retrace and sync use 20 lines for each field. So 40 lines per frame are reserved for such purpose, The remaining 485 lines per frame are used for active video signal, But since the last line is scanned from the edge of the screen and disappears in the center and resumes at the top center of the screen and finishes at the opposite edge of the screen both halves are considered as full lines by the pro capture cards with half black and half video for each line, so 486 it is.
I've also started to crop down the horizontal resolution to 704 since it's considered legal, that also took care of the useless padded 16 pixels (8 on each side) that was added in the ITU-Rec 601 (CCIR-601 or D1) standards and was adopted by all capture cards, That leaves a clean frame of 704x480 with 95% or so of active video, then I just add the 4:3 aspect ratio flag to the encoded file and wala.
I have a tape whose clean frame area varies between episodes on the tape, comprising between 694 and 705 clean pixels across, with between 10 and 21 pixels of useless area on the left and between 5 and 8 on the right. Maybe some of it is my VCR or capture card, but some is also the tape itself. I can't crop a fixed number of pixels on the sides to remove all of the useless picture area without also removing some of the clean picture area. Since the left and right edges aren't distracting, I just center as well as I can and don't crop the left and right sides at all.
That seems to be common with TV recordings, especially for shows with footage from mixed sources like documentaries. It would all have been hidden by overscan anyway so some footage having more black borders than other footage wouldn't matter to the end user. TBCs, video processors, cameras etc seems to have have varied a bit in where in the overscan area the transition between black and actual video data would be.
Yes, extra pixels in the border area is fine. Missing pixels in the picture area is not. The possibility of increased vertical picture area is one thing that makes the BrightEye interesting.
I have a tape whose clean frame area varies between episodes on the tape, comprising between 694 and 705 clean pixels across, with between 10 and 21 pixels of useless area on the left and between 5 and 8 on the right. Maybe some of it is my VCR or capture card, but some is also the tape itself. I can't crop a fixed number of pixels on the sides to remove all of the useless picture area without also removing some of the clean picture area. Since the left and right edges aren't distracting, I just center as well as I can and don't crop the left and right sides at all.
Vdub lets you customize what number of pixels you can crop on all 4 sides, for the vertical pixels make sure you crop in pairs to avoid reversing the field order, On all tapes I've done I haven't come across a tape with more than 704 pixels of H resolution because the standard of the first digital format (D1) was set to 704 for each analog scan line.
Overscan is only on CRT monitors and some of the old plasma's and LCD's, most of nowadays flat panels are set to just scan and the widescreen makes all that junk visible on the sides of the frame that's why I decided to go with 704x480, I played this captured clip on my OLED TV and I was impressed.
Thanks LordSmurf for the capture hardware... it came yesterday. Haven't had a chance to test it yet.
In the meantime I'm getting a weird problem with WinDV capture of some MiniDV (and some Hi8 tapes). The resultant AVI (Type I chosen to avoid audio drift I was getting with Type II) seems corrupt in some way and Premiere chokes on it (hangs permanently trying render frames from the last few seconds). When I export these AVIs as MP4s in Handbrake there is audio drift. If I trim the last 2 seconds in Premiere (without trying to view them), the resultant trimmed AVI exports properly in Handbrake. ffprobe reports interleaving problems with these trouble AVIs.
I've researched online and some people are saying that WinDV has audio output issues if you use the device control option, but I get these issues regardless if device control is on or off. I believe the problem lies in recordings that switch between LP and SP, with bit rates for audio changing between 12 and 16bit.
Does anyone know of these problems and possible workarounds?
Capturing DV over analog is a workaround, and quality different will be minimal at worst. Sometimes DV transfer simply will not cooperate, and you'll spend a lot of time and frustration attempting to "do it the right way" (transfer). But analog capture is fine. The biggest quality loss is the DV itself, and the original consumer camcorder low-quality optics.
I kept wondering what the characters were saying, so I looked it up. Still no idea why it was used so much in the books back then. Seriously, it seemed like at least once per digest issue. I forget which character used it most. Maybe Mr. Lodge?.
