Hey guys,
My dilemma: I need to have a small group of semi tech capable people around the country digitally capturing non commercial, “home made” tapes of live concerts into one standard format that will be archived.
File space is not a concern, and cost is secondary to detail. I need every possible bit of luma and chroma to be captured. (I will need need to learn/teach how to use histograms to make sure there’s no clipping, etc.)
For my purposes, I don’t need to know about any downstream restoration or editing, other teams will be working on that. I just want to know I am giving them (and future generations) the most possible image data to restore.
I’m going around and around in my head about the best way to accomplish my goal. I have had lots of conversations and have read everything I can find here and at videohelp, but I still can’t settle on the best workflow.
My project:
- Need to capture historically valuable concert footage from various vhs/s vhs/hi8/beta original master tapes.
- Accomplished by a small team of people (4-8) across the us. Technical ability solid but varies. Video technical experience limited.
- Captures will be archived “as is”, and then made available to other teams of restorers and editors who may choose to use various tools and programs to enhance/edit/fix the capture. (Totally volunteer/ ad hoc)
- Sound is secondary, as audio was taped separately using pro audio gear. As above, the captured video will be made available and other teams will create synched edits. (Totally volunteer/ ad hoc)
Progress so far:
- have been accumulating good gear with help of LS. Have several vcrs & beta machines, tbc 100, abt-8710, Es-15 (2), hi 8 camera, sign video dual process amp, signvideo detailer.
- have a bunch of capture cards/devices - ati600 usb, blackmagic shuttle, pinnacle usb, Aja kona LHi and others to start testing. We will share and or buy additional as needed.
- We have unlimited storage available, size of archive is not a concern.
Format/workflow considerations: Most of the group have recent windows based machines. We don’t have any windows xp machines. We don’t have any experience with avisynth or other command line based editors.
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So, what do we decide to make the “standard” in terms of capture and archive?
The simplest thing to me seems to buy several capture devices that support modern drivers and capture everything in a 10-bit lossless 4:2:2 format.
Overkill? Perhaps. But probably more forgiving in terms of histogram clipping and easier to get up and running on pc equipment already owned.
Downsides? I don’t know....
I realize
virtualdub matched with an ati card and
huffyuv lossless is the way things are done around here, and if that’s the absolutely best way for us to accomplish the task we will learn to do that as well.
But if there’s an alternative workflow that would meet our specific needs better, I’d love to figure it out now, before I go much further down the rabbit hole.
Thanks in advance for the discussion and experience,
Judd