Which capture card to buy for VHS generation loss?
 

Hello, the reason I am here is because to make sure I get the right capture card for artistic purposes I have not seen someone discuss here on the website, yet. The reason I am in search for a capture card is because my current one which is those generic, less than ten dollars, capture card does "ok" at the very least. Furthermore, I cannot capture footage where it has damage, degradation, or glitches as it will either capture it at a low frame rate or not capture it at all. I have asked this question on two subreddits beforehand and came to the conclusion of buying a Diamond ATI TV Wonder HD 600 capture card (PCIe variant). I asked the person who recommended me this capture card if it worked on windows 10 considering the drivers were for XP, and replied that he has seen people with windows 10 use this capture card. Additionally, before you recommend a TBC VCRs I have only seen one video on youtube that does generation loss with a TBC VCR which does not look good, in my opinion.
What I am trying to get to is that if the Diamond ATI TV Wonder HD 600 capture card is a decent capture card for capturing footage that is degraded or has glitches without any framerate loss. Which is a problem with my current and cheap capture card.

Thank you

My VCR: Toshiba SD-V296
Computer operating system: Windows 10 64-bit operating system
Vhs generation loss (LOOK IN DESCRIPTION for what they use to record it): https://youtu.be/G8GOcB6H0uQ
https://youtu.be/TShEKABYBVg
https://youtu.be/BoAHQM9coU8

The generic capture device will not do anything worthwhile for you. What do you see as "generation loss"? The loss of quality with a tape copied multiple times?

Yes I want to copy tapes multiple times to lower the quality and by you saying "generic capture device," is interesting because this video https://youtu.be/TShEKABYBVg where they use a Dazzle so not too sure how correct that statement is...

So to be absolutely clear:

* You want to take a tape and create generational loss, by copying the tape several times between VCRs.
* You then want to take the resulting tape and digitize it, but you want it digitized accurately, to show the generational loss and glitches, but not to lose the frame rate in the process.

I want this to be said upfront:

(1) I think wanting VHS errors is weird. But I will help. :congrats:

(2) If you actually want to show "VHS quality", then you simply have it crunch down to a resolution of about 250x480, then stretch those pixels back out to 640x480 at 4:3. Then apply slight Gaussian blur. The only remaining aspect is the color, which is more like 6-bit dithered. You can offset chroma by about 2px. That gives you VHS quality.

(3) "VHS quality" is not "shitty VCR quality". That's just a statement about a VCR, not VHS. And I think this is what you actually want. To achieve this is usually easy: use some cheap garbage VCRs from Goodwill, with one of those low-end HDMI-composite Chinese doodads, and record 4:3 out to a tape. Then copy it back and forth between the VCRs, reusing the same time, capturing it each time.

Attaining "VHS quality" really has nothing to do with capture cards.

That's because capture cards require a good signal. Not just "good" as a novice would think, but "good" as in it has proper timebase correction. Not having TBC often means bad captures, or no captures.

I finally got on Reddit recently. Which subs?

There is no PCIe ATI 600. There is a PCI, and it's known-bad card. It's not the respected ATI 600 USB, completely different.

Doubtful. Win10 fights with ATI cards (most capture cards, actually), especially non-USB.

Which exact model? That matters. You can't make general statements about "S-VHS VCRs"

What, exactly?

Degradation and glitches will be a problem with all capture cards. It must be timebase corrected. You can put garbage VCR video into a TBC-1000, and it will output the garbage. Some cheap TBCs, or flawed TBCs, will actually make the errors worse (and weird).

None of that is VHS generation loss. That's damaged incurred by cheap VCRs, recorded to an nth generation. That's really nothing special about that. In the VHS trading days, 80s and 90s, we saw lots of this. When you got past about a 2nd/3rd gen with cheap VCRs, it was unwatchable. But when we all used good VCRs, you could get well into the 5th+ gen area before it became unwatchable.

I'm sometimes amused by Youtube videos like that. It's just not accurate to facts. VHS was quite decent, and quality was entirely about the operator and the equipment. It's not different than cars. If I mistreat my car, it's not a statement about the quality of the car.

Correct.

Dazzle is a low-end card, minimally passable quality, and not without problems. It uses SAA7113, eMPIA audio+video+bridge. Not suggested, but better than worse cards (Easycaps).

That's my understand as well.

External frame TBC will become more required than normal.

I think the OP is trying to recreate bad video, but not in software, how it should be done. I've seen other threads like this and the ultimate answer is to create it in software because of the hardware issues/limitations stated above.

Can you please elaborate
 

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "create it in software because of hardware limitation."

As lordsmurf stated, there's a limit how bad tape playback can be before any capture device will refuse to capture the signal. In addition, a badly mangled tape like in the video you linked to can clog the videoheads beyond cleaning and in a rare worse case scenario cause permanent damage.

If you insist on doing things in realtime, you may have to play the video back on your TV and record the screen. TVs, especially old CRTs are much more forgiving of poor video signals than digital capture devices.

On the simple end, there are filters that you'd use in a video editor that can simulate things like dropouts and poor color. On the high end, someone skilled in CGI could simulate the things you see in the video. Everything else in between requires a clear idea of the effect you're looking for and using a combination of filters, video compositing software, to layer effects, and CGI.

In the end, understand that purposely mangling tapes for effects may be the death of your VCR at any moment.

There is an easy way if the goal is to just show the VHS generational loss, Hookup your VCR to a flat panel that has the same refresh rate as your camcorder and just record the screen with a HD or 4K camcorder, That way your camcorder will provide a stable video that doesn't rely on the garbled VHS frame rate and the viewer get to see it on TV just as you are, kind of like real life experience.
The only instance where it is best to get a captured feed is when you want to show the original quality of a tape or a player, You are doing the opposite so....

The OP isn't just looking for quality loss due to multigenerational dubs, if you watch the videos he/she linked to, he/she's looking to recreate physically mangled tapes with creases, crinkles, tracking errors, etc.

But he wants the digital capture to accurately reflect the state of the deliberate destruction--not add errors caused by poor digital capture.

I had a similar project myself recently.

Had my final output from a Premiere timeline (exported as SD video), burnt to a DVD, played this DVD connected RCA out into a 6 head Sony VCR, recorded to VHS, then played this VCR out into a junk VCR and recorded to a second VHS, then replayed that back into the Sony, back into the junk, repeat about 6 or 7 times.

Once I was satisfied wit the VHS degradation (or whatever you'd like to call it), I then played that VHS back in a non-TBC VCR connected to an external TBC connected to a Canopus ADVC-110 and captured over Firewire. Not the best set up for a normal tape but it worked well for these purposes.

You can recreate the 'VHS effect' in software but in my opinion it does doesn't compare to the real thing.

Ahhh...hadn't thought about that. This way the signal from the dubbed tape will be clean as it just records what it's fed. The dubbing VCR may blue screen if the input signal is too mangled and lost.