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  #1  
08-03-2011, 01:15 AM
ErikCalifornia ErikCalifornia is offline
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Hi Everyone,

Unfortunately, someone in my family recently passed where I am now in state where I need to re-organize a lot in my life to see what I need to keep and what I can possibly get rid of.

I have a lot of VHS tapes with family video on them. Because they are sensitive to things such as age, the weather, temperature, and are really no friends to magnets, I would like to transfer all my master VHS tapes to digital video (DV). I want to get rid of the VHS tapes so that I don't need to worry about them since they seem to be so fragile.

In starting from the begging, I don't care much about post processing (want to save some time to do ONLY the transfer steps correctly). I am more interested in the transfer of all that VHS video/audio data over to digital video (DV) where I no longer have to have the need to keep the mast VHS tapes.

My understanding, at least as of now, is that if I can first copy all the raw VHS audio/video over to DV, I can then in the years ahead spend time on post processing. So my goal and focus right now is simply on doing the data transfer from VHS to DV as correctly as possible. So whatever steps I need to take to do that, I am interested in.

Current Hardware that I own and have with me right now:

1) JVC HR-S7800 which is found here http://support.jvc.com/consumer/prod...2&archive=true

2) ADVC 300 which can be found here http://www.grassvalley.com/products/advc300

Question #1: Is this adequate hardware to be used to convert the analog video and audio into DV? Is there any additional hardware that others may suggest?

Things I have heard:

1) The JVC VCR I have is pretty good considering it has a 2MB TBC. Yet, do I still need an additional TBC? Would that really make a big difference? I've read somewhere this is pretty good: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produc...Time_Base.html.

2) Some say the ADVC 300 filters tend to get in the way of things (they can't ever be fully disabled when needed). Because of this, I have heard the ADVC 300 can introduce ghosting of the video? Others say the ADVC 300 is great and really helps. I've heard great reviews on it from those who have purchased and used it. And, then I have heard others say Grass Valley has hyped up the ADVC 300 more than it really is. So which is it?

3) Is the ADVC 300 adequate for transferring the VHS tape? Or is there a better analog to digital video conversion box? I want to extract ALL that I can from the VHS tapes that could possibly be extracted from it's analog form.

4) Colorspace: I have heard that digital doesn't capture all the analog color? I don't really see how that could be? My understanding is that people don't seem to know how to properly convert the VHS colors into colors that look good on the computer and so have a perception that VHS color doesn't transfer well into the digital world? Is that the case? Or, it is really a matter of the proper colors not being captured correctly from VCR?

Miscellaneous questions or thoughts to discuss:

1) The ADVC 300 has a SMPTE color bar chart that can be output from the device? How do I use the SMPTE color bar to calibrate the video being transferred correctly from the VHS tape into DV to be stored on the computer? Does it even really matter in transferring the VHS to DV?

2) It would seem to me that even if the video stream from the VHS into it's DV doesn't fall into the NTSC broadcast range, that it wouldn't really matter since all the converted analog to digital data is indeed within the data? What I mean to say is that it doesn't seem to really matter if the data sent from ADVC 300 to the computer from the VHS tape has the 7.5 IRE set correctly? Or does it? It would seem to me that all the data would still be caught within the data stream. If that's true, then isn't messing with the 7.5 IRE and color corrections a matter of post production processing? Remember, my goal is simply to get all the raw data from the VHS where in the future I can post process the data. However, I want to do everything correctly from the standpoint of transferring the VHS analog data into it's proper digital form. I want the HIGHEST uncompressed quality so the VHS tape is no longer need.

3) It would seem the standard archival resolution for VHS is 720 x 480. Is there any purposes in capturing in a higher resolution? Or would this resolution suffice? Are there better conversion boxes that capture at a higher resolution? Or would the 720 x 480 be the proper and sufficient resolution to archive VHS tapes in?

4) I also read/heard that DV is really a "hack": that the DV format was never meant to be used to store VHS video. The reason people seem to argue is that the DV format is not, I guess, the best format to work in? Or there is some sort of degradation from the DV format?

Looking forward to the discussion and thoughts!

Thanks,

Erik
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08-03-2011, 03:36 PM
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A longer reply is forthcoming. However, for quick reference, you DO NOT WANT the Canopus ADVC-300. Reasons and details will follow shortly. I'm not sure how far along in your purchasing decisions you may be, and I'd hate to see you piss away that much money on a device that really won't do you any favors. Figured I'd cut you off as quickly as possible.

Again, more soon.

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08-04-2011, 04:24 AM
ErikCalifornia ErikCalifornia is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by admin View Post
A longer reply is forthcoming. However, for quick reference, you DO NOT WANT the Canopus ADVC-300. Reasons and details will follow shortly. I'm not sure how far along in your purchasing decisions you may be, and I'd hate to see you piss away that much money on a device that really won't do you any favors. Figured I'd cut you off as quickly as possible.

Again, more soon.
Great! Looking forward to your thoughts.
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02-01-2012, 12:38 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ErikCalifornia View Post
Current Hardware that I own and have with me right now:
1) JVC HR-S7800
2) ADVC 300
Question #1: Is this adequate hardware to be used to convert the analog video and audio into DV? Is there any additional hardware that others may suggest?
The VCR is fine.
The DV converter is so-so. There is better hardware, for non-DV conversion of video tapes. There's a number of annoyances with the way the Canopus DV boxes handle video. The 4:1:1 NTSC colorspace is also not all that conducive to retaining the full color quality found on the original tape, regardless of what somebody's white paper on DV compression says. Eyes and meters don't lie.

Quote:
1) The JVC VCR I have is pretty good considering it has a 2MB TBC. Yet, do I still need an additional TBC?
Yes, for signal purification. Read more here: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...time-base.html
That link explains it pretty in depth.

Quote:
2) Some say the ADVC 300 ... So which is it?
Some people simply wouldn't know what quality was if it walked up punched them in the nose. Therein lies the biggest issues with reviews. People don't always know what they don't know. In the consumer world, "good enough" is a common mantra, and quite often it's used as an excuse to apologize for items lacking in quality. The Canopus ADVC is "good enough" but it's certainly not going to pull every bit of data out of those VHS tapes. Some information will be lost, as the NTSC DV format is double-compression.

Quote:
I want to extract ALL that I can from the VHS tapes that could possibly be extracted from it's analog form.
Then you want a lossless format, like Huffyuv AVI -- not DV AVI.

Quote:
4) Colorspace: I have heard that digital doesn't capture all the analog color?
It depends on the format. Put into digital terms, VHS is somewhere along the lines of 4:2:2 colorspace. Technically speaking, analog video doesn't have measurable value aside from Mhz. To swipe a quote from Wikipedia:

Many analog videotape systems rely on a downconverted color subcarrier in order to record color information in their limited bandwidth. These systems are referred to as "heterodyne systems" or "color-under systems". For instance, for NTSC video systems, the VHS (and S-VHS) recording system converts the color subcarrier from the NTSC standard 3.58 MHz to ~629 kHz. PAL VHS color subcarrier is similarly downconverted (but from 4.43 MHz). The now-obsolete 3/4" U-matic systems use a heterodyned ~688 kHz subcarrier for NTSC recordings (as does Sony's Betamax, which is at its basis a 1/2" consumer version of U-matic), while PAL U-matic decks came in two mutually incompatible varieties, with different subcarrier frequencies, known as Hi-Band and Low-Band. Other videotape formats with heterodyne color systems include Video-8 and Hi8. The heterodyne system in these cases is used to convert quadrature phase-encoded and amplitude modulated sine waves from the broadcast frequencies to frequencies recordable in less than 1 MHz bandwidth. On playback, the recorded color information is heterodyned back to the standard subcarrier frequencies for display on televisions and for interchange with other standard video equipment.

If you use 4:2:2 or better capturing hardware, you'll get all your color.

Quote:
My understanding is that people don't seem to know how to properly convert the VHS
This can also be true.

Quote:
1) The ADVC 300 has a SMPTE color bar chart ... Does it even really matter in transferring the VHS to DV?
It doesn't really serve any purpose for capturing. At most, it could help you calibrate a TV. But even then, not really useful.

Quote:
the VHS tape has the 7.5 IRE set correctly?
I want the HIGHEST uncompressed quality so the VHS tape is no longer need.
I don't think I have the words to properly describe the headaches IRE gives me. The biggest problem is that nothing is calibrated anyway. Everything is all over the map. The TV, the TV station, the video camera, the recording devices -- everything. Ideally, everything should be within range of the spec values, but it never really happened. I can change between PBS1, PBS2, Fox, ABC, NBC, etc -- and come up with different IRE values.

If you want the highest quality, just leave well enough along. By attempting to "fix" IRE that's "close enough" ("good enough"), you'll more likely just make a bigger mess. Virtually every TV has black level controls these days, and even good DVD/Blu-ray players have long had similar "picture mode" controls. If the black is a bit off, just use that to fix it. Every channel here has a custom color profile on my Sony HDTV. Same for the Blu-ray player, DVD player, Wii, etc. I constantly alter the two players, to look best with the disc.

Quote:
3) It would seem the standard archival resolution for VHS is 720 x 480. Is there any purposes in capturing in a higher resolution?
No, and for the reasons given in your more recent post: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...hs-family.html

Quote:
4) I also read/heard that DV is really a "hack": that the DV format was never meant to be used to store VHS video. The reason people seem to argue is that the DV format is not, I guess, the best format to work in? Or there is some sort of degradation from the DV format?
This has been my observation for years. DV was a shooting format that got ported to Pentium III computers a few years later, with the supposed goal of converting video (meaning tapes). But the colorspace compression didn't always cooperate well with the already-lousy color quality of VHS and S-VHS. When something is only passable in quality, compressing it further is a fairly harebrained idea. Yet that's what DV does.

---------

I found this post by looking at what your previous posts were.
Your updated questions are here: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...hs-family.html
But I still thought this was worth a follow-up.


This was an unanswered question or unresolved issue found during a site audit. It's hard to have an FAQ when the answers are missing, or final outcomes are unknown. At The Digital FAQ support forum, questions are never intentionally ignored, and may have been missed due to a forum glitch or human error. More details on the audit. (In some cases, threads have been edited/updated with newer information.)


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