What parts to build PC to capture VHS/Hi8 tapes?
 

Hello there.

Looking for advice on the parts to buy for building a PC just to capture VHS/Hi8 tapes to lossless AVI

Current Setup:
Panasonic DMR-ES46V
Canopus ADVC 100
Macbook Pro

I spent quite a bit of time reading the forums and decided to try the Canopus ADVC route since I have a macbook. I wasn't very happy with the results.

The DMR-ES46V has an HDMI out so I was able to see what both the captured video and the video direct from the VCR looked like on the same monitor. The difference between the two is quite clear. I'd read a lot references to this on the forum but seeing it in action makes a big difference.

I'm looking at a budget of about $500.

I have no experience building a PC from scratch but I do have experience with computers.

-- merged --

I've decided to just buy the pieces and make things easier. I've ordered an an ATI TV Wonder HD 600 USB and a relatively cheap PC. HP, 10th Generation i3, 8 GB RAM, Integrated Graphics Card, 1TB HDD + 256GB SSD.

How do you like the captured VHS footage from the HDMI output? I'm picking up a used DMR-ES46V tomorrow. I'm excited to see the results as I'll be recording in near RAW from my Blackmagic field recorder.

I didn't capture the VHS from the HDMI output. Here's my setup

Panasonic DMR-ES46V S-Video Out -> ATI TV Wonder HD 600 USB S-Video In -> VirtualDub on Windows XP PC -> HuffYUV AVI

The quality from that is fantastic. Really looks like a 1:1 copy. HuffYUV is lossless compression so you get much smaller files than RAW. I tried using Windows 10 but ran into some issues that went away when I switched to XP. The HDMI output from the DMR-ES46V looks great on a monitor but I'm not sure what you'll get if you try to capture that way.

Cool - thanks for the reply. Yeah, I'm gonna test run HDMI capture using ProRes HQ. I figure that the quality has to be pretty good since it's directly from the source to a modern-day digital field recorder (albeit lots of internal video processing from the VCR).

The attached jpg is my current workflow.

Here's a sample of my footage with this method (ignore the intro stuff):
Sample 1: https://youtu.be/pkG7Up11syQ
Sample 2: https://youtu.be/5IOAzRlbJ-s

When I setup the new ES46V tomorrow, I'll see if I can upload some HDMI capture samples from VHS!

Looks like your workflow is designed to get the footage directly into Premiere so you can edit it. So that setup works for that case. The ES46V should fit right in. HDMI instead of S-Video is the main unknown here. I'm a bit surprised you were using a Betamax lol. But if it works it works.

The quality of the VHS footage in your Youtube videos is pretty good. The first video has some unexpected diagonal lines and that weird "turn this video into a painting" smoothing effect I'm not a fan of. I'm assuming that comes from the 4K Upscaler. The footage in the 2nd video looks really good. Although some of those jagged diagonal lines from the deinterlacer show up here and there. But that's only on close examination.

DV isn't great. PAL is acceptable (4:2:0), NTSC really is not (4:1:1). So not surprised here. But Mac was always a DV-centric workflow, you had few alternative choices. Some things work well with 10.14 and earlier, and then 10.6 and earlier. Sort of like how the best Windows OS is WinXP or Win7.

That should be fine. ATI 600 USB doesn't have many hardware conflicts, it's the OS that matters.

Either you lack a TBC (bad), or the ES46V has a line TBC like the ES10/15 (though likely weaker). Dangerous. What was your frame drops like?

That's a big mistake. HDMI methods mess with interlace, colorspace, resolution, etc. You're going to butcher the video.

This is false. There's no "directly from the source", that statement doesn't make any sense. "Modern" capture cards (any HDMI output/input) is for HD, and differ vastly from SD (especially tape-based interlaced consumer videotapes, like VHS). Trying to force HDMI to capture SD is jamming a round peg into a square hole. And it's the capture card that overly processes the video, not just the VCR.

You're butchering the video. There is no reason that the interlace should be that bad, no reason the video should have that many artifacts. Look at the zigzag lines in the window @ 4:19 on this clip. With proper capture, and a proper QTGMC deinterlace, that footage would be perfect.

As it stands now, honestly, your footage is not enjoyable to watch. I'd just stop watching, and find something else on Youtube. I'm not going to insult my eyes and ears with bad quality. I'm not trying to be harsh here, just honest with you. And I hope you take it all in good stride, and learn to do better conversions. Read the forum, ask more questions, and we'll get you onto the path of quality video. Don't get defensive, pout..

This is a bad thing. NLEs are notorious for low quality filtering of videotape content, and often induce dropped frames. With many HD cards, like Blackmagic, dropped frames are not even reported, so you're flying blind to it messing up your captures.

Edit with an NLE (non-linear editor). Don't capture with it. Import the captures in the NLE.

Not really.
- There's lots of various noises, some of which are likely being caused by the setup, not something inherent on the source tape.
- Interlace errors.
- And I saw some places (that Japanese video especially) that were just unwatchably choppy with dropped frames.

I think you misunderstood. I'm referring to the internal video conversion of the Panasonic DMR-ES46V (HDMI upscaling). The HDMI output from the DMR-ES46V can either be 720p or 1080p interlaced. Source being the Panasonic unit. I'll simply be capturing the HD output from the DMR-ES46V to the field recorder, nothing else. I purchased this unit out of curiosity mostly, to see how well the DMR-ES46V performs in it's HD upscaling. Again, this is just for my own curiosity and personal comparisons.

Also, I'm not offended, although your comments are usually beyond curt at times, ha! Saying "I'm not going to insult my eyes and ears with bad quality" towards my work, then telling me to not get defensive is more humorous than insulting. I'm a grown man, I can take it. Just be sure not to be offended by me addressing what you said...

Anyhow, I've actually come to you for help on several occasions over the last ten or so years on this forum, and you've been very helpful. I used a different username which I'm unfortunately not able to find the username I had used. Old age is getting to me.

Yup, the first vid was actually from a Panasonic AG 1980 for my VHS workflow. The second link with the JP footage was from a Beta unit. I've always been able to squeeze out better quality from Beta.

I'm really curious about the ES46V internal HDMI upscaling though. Should be fun seeing how this late 2000's unit performs when capturing from a prosumer field recorder. What I love about my current workflow is that there's no computer or operating system involved in the capture process. Makes things really simple.

I believe the diagonal lines are from the tape recording, as this artifact is not apparent in most of my VHS conversions, although I've seen it before on rare occasion. Here's a sample from the exact same capture workflow. I don't use any filters or the like in Premiere, so any weirdness in image quality is most likely directly from the tape recording.

1999 VHS tape capture - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCMF_T1t4pc&t=3s

In that sample, the diagonal lines are not there, yet nothing changed in the VHS workflow.

Nope, not confused. It's heavily processed inside the unit, and is farther away from "the source" than basic VCRs.

Always good to experiment. :congrats:

Good to know. :congrats:

My brevity is often due to time, and my difficulties typing.

But lots of Youtubers are (1) easily "triggered" these days, and (2) require adoration. If you deviate from compliments, they get their panties in a wad. They don't take criticism well at all, and get defensive, dismissive, passive aggressive. So I often just cut to the chase: you're doing bad, let's help you fix it, and let's skip the usual defensive/excuse preface.

Awesome. I'm still here. Ask away, I try to help. :salute:

If you know what email it may be under, we can always look it up. :wink2:

That workflow butchers the video especially if youtube is the final transmission, Never encode for youtube just feed it the lossless file after resizing it to 1440x1080 and preferably de-interlaced with QTGMC, Yes it may take the whole night to upload but your video doesn't get double encoded. Never use NLE software, they tend to transcode the video just to be compliant and they encode again when you make the import to the final codec, yikes. And most importantly never convert SDI to HDMI, big mistake, just feed it to computer using a SDI-USB interface.

Hmm, I didn't know Premiere can upload directly to YouTube without rendering first. I'll look into it. I don't convert SDI to HDMI actually. It's captured in SD. Thx!

I confirm, it's best procedure.

For "interlaced" videos where fields are coming from the same istant in time (and then do not require to be deinterlaced) I do not process the fields and upload the 1440x1080 HuffYUV avi file directly.

Youtube leaves them at 25 frames per second, and do not mess with the fields. Unfortunately the compression it applies (also on deinterlaced sources) is quite heavy, visible on the backgrounds.
A sample here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5RLo6Ktqdg (however, also the original video master was not that good)

In the same post I said never use NLE, Whatever capture app that supports your device (not premiere), take the resulting file, de-interlace, resize and upload to youtube.

I've been tweaking my youtube workflow for over two years now and I settled on the following procedure:

- Capture raw 4:2:2 HuffYUV 720x480 - save these as the master files.
- De-interlace with QTGMC, crop to the bare active video area on all 4 corners and resize to 1440x1080 all in one script.
- Save the project file along with the corresponding master file
- Upload to youtube
- Delete the huge processed file

https://www.youtube.com/user/latoak34/videos

Spoiler alert: The deinterlacing of these Panasonic units sucks. Lots of stray combs. I think this particular model came out in 2007. Even the high-end real-time deinterlacers from that time can't compete with software solutions 14 years on (and these ones weren't even good for the time).

After the deinterlace to 480p, the "upscaling" is just a basic resize to 720p. The 1080i output is even more useless, since it requires a second deinterlace.

The VCR side of these units is fed into the digitizer via composite. The result is the same as if you hooked up a cheap VCR to the external inputs.

Unlike the other responses, I'm not against HDMI capture for VHS in general, but (with North American models) you have to be very careful to produce a result that isn't worse than a traditional lossless capture.

Because there is no 480i option, I losslessly capture 480p from the HDMI output of my DVD recorders, and select the original fields in Avisynth. The result is the unmolested 480i. From there, further software processing can be applied as desired.

Are you sure that the de-interlacing process in the Panasonic is lossless? I would be surprised!

Edit: I mean lossless de-interlacing, not lossless compression

For Youtube, I convert to 4:2:2 high bitrate H.264, before upload, and never upload a lossless. I'm honestly not sure I see the point of a lossless upload.

For long videos (> 10 minutes), I also compress to x264 before uploading to youtube, with a crf=17.

I upload full uncompressed, but I'm not convinced it makes any difference.

Yes. Apart from actual video, I used analog tuner noise as a stress test. Captured HDMI and S-Video outputs at the same time, compared field-by-field.

Actually, the only Bob-type deinterlacer I know of that alters the original fields is QTGMC (when lossless is not enabled). Are there others?

Understood.

In my understanding:

Bob without (0.0,1.0)
Yadiff without mode=1
MVBob
MCBob
TempGaussMC (father of QTGMC)
...

Not important, everybody today is using QTGMC (except me using nnedi3, or QTGMC lossless, for material I want to filter spatial-temporally and interlace back at the end)

In my memory, the bolded three are all spiritual/actual predecessors of QTGMC, but thanks for naming them.

Yadif without mode=1 isn't a bobber, so that doesn't count. :)

I forgot about Avisynth's own Bob at default settings! Touché.

MCBob yes, is from dideè, MVBob is from scharfis_brain. Re-touchè! :wink2:

TDeint in default mode is also not lossless IIRC

Edit:
???

P.S.: a good deinterlacer is not lossless

To clarify: by default, Yadif is a single-rate deinterlacer. With mode=1 it's a bobber (double-rate deinterlacer). You listed "Yadiff without mode=1", well without double-rate output of course it does much worse than altering the fields, it throws out half of them.

int mode = 0
0 : single frame rate, temporal and spatial interlacing check (default).
1 : double frame rate, temporal and spatial interlacing check.
2 : single frame rate, skips spatial interlacing check.
3 : double frame rate, skips spatial interlacing check.

The sad part is that I actually read that section of the Wiki before posting. :o I'll take your word for it that mode=3 is lossy; never used it.

I did several experiment to find a lossless deinterlacer for my restoration flow, but it was loooong time ago, so do no trust me too much :wink2:

You get convinced by trying, I've been uploading samples to youtube and download them back to computer and compare the downloads to each other, I've seen less compression artifacts on the HuffYUV ones vs the 4:2:2 h.264 pre encoded ones. I tried several captures (SP, EP, V8, Hi8, S-VHS ...) over the span of 2 years, The first year was mainly playing with 480i vs 480p vs 720p vs 1080p, it didn't take long to find out that 1080p was the best.

What's your YouTube channel?

Few posts above, I didn't post the samples publicly, just for my own testing, I upload TV commercials now.

Pls share your channel. I’d love to see it. Mine is Dave’s Archives.

I did, as I said few posts above, I think post #12, It's an enfant channel with much room to grow, though I'm not willing to make any money out of it, just sharing the memories.

I guess that the latreche34 YouTube channel isn't anything to do with you then?

Very cool. Looks like I’m already subscribed to your channel.

Uploading HuffYUV in principle is always the best if no time and/or disk space is relevant, but I want to share my experiment on my last youtube video, created for a friend:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiQj3k4orIo&t=62s

which has been uploaded after a x264 compression with crf=17.

I uploaded also a small sequence without x264 compression, using the HuffYUV file.

I then downloaded the 2 videos elaborated by youtube with JDownloader 2 and compared them.

video comparison:
Attachment 14135

image comparison:
Youtube after processing: mp4 versus huffYUV
https://imgsli.com/NzA5MDQ

I see no significat difference, which I suspect to be not good, because it means that the youtube compression (applied on both) may hyde the small quality difference of the lossless file

However, when I also compare the files before upload (and then before youtube compression) I see a very very small difference in term of quality (i reinvented the whell, low crf x264 compression is almost transparent)

video comparison:
Attachment 14134

image comparison:
Youtube source: mp4 versus huffYUV
https://imgsli.com/NzA5MDM

For my videos there is not significant difference after upload if a crf=17 x264 compression is performed before upload, so, while for small duration video I will still upload huffYUV version, for long video I will compress to x264 with crf=17 before upload.

Just a side note, When resizing to 1080 there is no reason to keep the black borders around the frame, The resizing of lines and pixels will not be an integer ratio, the mathemathical approximation will have to be done anyway so may as well remove the boarders and keep a clean frame.

Good hint, the problem is that I have a different "active" image in each capture, so, in the fear of introducing a distortion, I add the black borders removed during the filtering and then resize to 1440x1080, by default.

Specially for letterbox video the final result is horrible, I will try to improve it.

I set custom visual cropping for each tape, Commercials are tricky, they don't have the same active area so I find the sweet spot for all, AVSPmod allows me to scroll through the time line and see each segment so the final crop works for most of the video, once satisfied I hit apply, It also allows me to see the de-interlacing results and resizing instantly, pretty neat.

If you look at my videos you'll still see some odd ball commercials with black bars left over but 90% of the video looks fine.

The TV overscan days took away more than what we crop now in digital capture, almost like 20 pixels on each side but we never noticed.

I do the same, and just as example, this is a set of some of the "active area" I found on my 720x576 captures:

# width x height
# 698x544
# 688x560
# 690x560
# 690x562
# 688x564
# 704x552
# 688x570
# 694x566
# 694x570
:eek: :eek:

Assuming that the 4:3 PAL SD aspect ratio is based on the 720x576 non-square pixel capture, or better on the 704x576 non-square pixel area, if I crop every video to its active area and then blindly resize to 1440x1080, the "proportion" of one will not be the same of another, and not by a negligible amount :paranoid:

That's why I keep the original black borders, but may be I am just over-processing...

Unfortunatly it is based on 704x576 for PAL/SECAM and 704x480 for NTSC (refer to the circle test I made over at VH), But for cropping you can drift away from that ratio by up to 5 pixels vertically or horizontally before it can be noticeable, and honestly most people don't even notice 720x576 and 720x480 directly formatted into 4:3. Some are even okay with 4:3 being stretched to 16:9, even some clueless technicians did it at the proffesional level in TV stations back in the day.

That's what I said, and your experiment was what convinced me! (I repeated on my side as well)

Uhm, that's honestly too much, but people are strange. But I upload the video for myself and some friends only.

That's one of the reason why in Italy and in general in Europe (except Germany and maybe BBC in UK) the broadcasted programs are so bad even nowadays :depressed:

Edit: even if it not a crime like 4:3 being stretched to 16:9, but rather a "mutilation", here a sample of commercial vhs and dvb-s dump of the same movie through the years:
Attachment 14142

i found this old news report about hdtv from 1989 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIEE6ryfKNI do you have any idea what the commercials are in this video? they're in the first 3 minutes. since you have several videos about japanese commercials i figured you might know. i'm curious if there are hd versions of those commercials floating around out there. i'm an old school hd enthusiast and i've been tracking down lots of hd footage from the 80s and 90s. example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRS_kKDWwe8

how do you do a lossless resize? going from 720x480 to 1440x1080 don't you have to re-encode? or is it a metadata aspect ratio resize. like changing the display aspect ratio from 3:2 to 1440:1080. but then i'd be worried youtube would ignore the metadata and you get a 720x480 video.