How common is this VHS tearing at top of screen?
 

I'm having this problem with all 3 tapes I've tried to capture so far. How common is it, what's the likely source, and can I do anything else about it? It happens on both my JVC SR-V101US and JVC HR-S7800U, always appearing randomly at the top, and the only way to get rid of it is to disable the VCR's TBC/NR and engage "video stabilizer". The problem with this is that I then get an increase in the rate that the frame randomly shifts up and down, even with either VCR--> ES15 pass-thru --> capture, or VCR --> TBC-4000 --> capture, or VCR --> ES15 --> TBC-4000 --> capture.

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With the VCR TBC/NR off so that the video stabilizer can be on to get rid of the issue in the first clip, this is the kind of frame movement up and down I'm still getting even with the ES15 passthrough.

Erich

I've come across this sort of tearing quite often on VHS tapes. I don't know what exactly causes it though. Normally an ES10/15 or some other DVRs (some pioneer/sony and toshiba ones at least) can deal with it though often with some flashing/unstable colour in that part of the image, though in this case it seems that doesn't solve things fully either.

I just had a tape that had really horrible up/down jumping like this, though it didn't have tearing issues so it may have been a different issue. The only setup that managed to keep it reasonably stable was putting it in our Panasonic AG7350 Broadcast deck and using the built-in TBC in the Sony betacam deck that we had sitting around. Neither our TBC-3000 or an ES10 could deal with it. Not a very easy solution though.

Maybe you could test it on a different comsumer VCR together with the ES15 if you have any sitting around and see if the works better there. It's possible that alignment and/or backtension can have an impact on it but I don't know.

I do have an old consumer Sony SLV-779HF deck, but I never even considered trying it since it doesn't even have s-video, just composite and co-ax out and no signal filtering options that I can see other than Adaptive Picture Control which is of course not explained.

What's frustrating me is that the same thing is happening on both my svhs decks. Video Stabilizer takes care of the tearing but leaves me with the up and down frame movements. It's not constant, but happens often enough to be visible. I assumed the ES15 and/or TBC-4000 should be able to deal with the slight up and down movement, but maybe I'm not understanding correctly their capabilites even after reading as much as I have on this site.

Erich

Sample 1

This is usually ugly copy protection. I have it on a Young Indiana Jones Chronicles tape, and a The Tick cartoon tape, and both are in my TBC testing stack for that reason. The Tick can be reduced with JVC TBC off, ES15 in use, and is still touchy with external TBCs, doesn't like frame syncing. The signal is screwed.

But it can also be a natural error, usually on re-copied tapes. The error was on my homemade VHS EP set of Voltron, and is an image that I used for the main site JVC TBC guide that shows how TBC can sometimes hurt an image. Rare, but happens, so wanted others to always try turning it off. But the ES15 almost always fixed natural errors.

Sample 2

The upper signal is damaged, and either presents as tearing, or correct with potentially missing lines, hence the image jitter.

Anyway...

The software fix is to crop tearing, and stablize jitter with my Avisynth stabmod()*
* stab() with tweaks for VHS source.

Keep playing musical hardware, see if a combo works. Another reason to have lots of VCRs, TBCs, capture cards.

Sometimes settings of the hardware.

Welcome to video, welcome to my world. Are you having fun yet? :D

I fear the forum software would censor my answer. :D

I'd be very surprised if these tapes have any sort of copy protection. I can't go into the source, but they're first generation tapes made from studio masters by the studio itself for someone's approval before the show was broadcast, so not commercial tapes or recorded off the air.

Can you explain what you mean by that?

The sample I posted was exported from MPEGStreamclip, and I wanted to post a direct stream version. I'm trying to get VDub2 to export my QT uncompressed 10-bit YUV to the Huffy lossless codec you can read on your Windows system, but Media Info tells me the new file is progressive. I don't see any such setting in the Huffy lossless compression settings in VDub2.

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Here's a direct stream segment in the original QT uncompressed 10-bit YUV capture format.