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