Time base error or bad tape section?

[Hjane]

Hello!

After reading the forums here I invested in a Panasonic NV-HS1000 VCR and a Hauppauge VCB-e capture card to digitize family videos from VHS-C casettes in PAL format. Previously I already digitized them using a consumer VCR and an EasyCAP (I know, I know...). My only complaint from this previous capture (at the time!) were a handful of casettes that occasionally switched to grayscale video with coloured stripes across the image horizontally (green/purple). This appeared mostly throughout the entire duration with varying severity. I initially ascribed this to a degraded tape, but then I though, hey, let me see if it can get any better. (I just now saw that this is a common issue with cheap hardware, most recently perhaps here: Color banding issue)

Fast-forward to the new setup:
NV-HS1000 ==> S-video + RCA audio to 3.5mm Jack ==> Hauppauge VCB-e ==> Virtualdub 1.10.4 (HuffYUV)


Using this workflow I made some nice progress with the casettes that previously showed the "colour loss and green/purple stipes". These were recorded in my newest attempt in a much better quality with proper colour, no stripes or colour banding, although perhaps a bit noisy. Still, it was nice to see the "instant" improvement. However, in every such tape there are some parts, where the entire image jumps completely left and right, exposing large patches of black areas. Independent of any settings that I use (on the VCR itself or in the capture settings) I always get this error at the same parts of the video. The error is new to this workflow and looks something like in the following image.
PAL_error0018.png

This is where I am stuck and would appreciate some input before proceeding. Based on my searches, the closest I came to finding this exact problem was Excellent videos showing the exact effects of time base errors & TBC, where tapping on the VHS deck makes the image jump around. This would then appear to me as a severe time base error at only some sections of a few tapes. I realize I do not have an external TBC and my main question would be, is this the cause? Would an external TBC help remedy this artifact/error or is this some other issue and I am on the wrong track?


Thank you.

[hodgey]

I haven't tried the PCIe version, but that's the effect you get on the USB cards with conexant chips when they lose track of sync. A TBC or the right DVD-recorder would probably avoid it.

The TBC in the NV-HS1000, like most VCR tbcs, doesn't have the memory to buffer whole frames, so it can't correct all errors.

[Hjane]

I was suspecting a frame-level issue based on the picture, but I wanted to be sure. I will then probably try an ES10 passthrough first, as discussed in a few other threads, and see how that works out.

Thanks for the input!

[Hjane]

Just to report back on this topic, I got a Panasonic DMR-ES10 and this resolved the issue. Using the DVD recorder as a pass-through device, the error shown in the original post is now completely elliminated.