Welcome to digitalFAQ.
I assume you've been through the forum's capture guides. There are several parts to the guides shown on this page:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/guides/video.htm. The VHS to digital business starts with the heading "Video Capturing / Concept Guides" That section includes
- "
Introduction to Capturing & Recording Video"
- "
Understanding Your Source"
- "
Playback Hardware Suggestions (VCRs and TBCs)" and a couple of other chapters.
Farther down near the middle of the page at
http://www.digitalfaq.com/guides/video.htm is an important section under the heading "Restore Video". There is only one chapter: "
Introduction to Restoring Video". While it's basic intro-only, I suggest you take a look before deciding on the method and equipment you want to use for capture.
Many don't bother with restoration. What they get is noise-infested video that's annoying to watch. They blame results on VHS itself. That blame is partially justified, but what's more at fault is either bad post-processing or no post-processing. Anyone who thinks VHS is
supposed to look horrible is either uninformed or simply accepting of low graphics standards. People often won't accept a bad or sloppy photo print or a bad wedding album job from a drug store or photographer without asking for a re-work or a refund. But they accept low quality video work from their own PC's and blame it entirely on the tape. Poor results aren't exclusive to analog sources: we've seen plenty of digital sources that were damaged or ruined using poor transfer and processing methods.
You didn't mention what player you use to play your tapes. Good quality begins with the player, not elsewhere. The quality of the player affects all subsequent operations.
"Out-of-print" suggests retail movie tapes or old TV series. I still have about 15 remaining from my old collection (I saved the worst for last, so I guess I still have some work ahead LOL!). Video based on movie film sources, which includes a lot of TV shows, involves Macrovision. Not all retail tapes are copy protected. Those that are, require a frame-level external tbc. The frame tbc is inserted between the player and the capture device. For analog tape you'll also need another type of tbc, called a line-level tbc. A line tbc is either built into the player or inserted after the player and before the frame tbc.
The type of TBC's referred to are not found as "cards". The capture device you linked to will "work", in that it will create a relatively low quality lossy encoded video that will look as bad or worse than the original tape (usually worse), and in an interframe format designed for final delivery, not for damage-free edits and certainly not for post-cleanup.
The prime VHS capture cards recommended in this forum and elsewhere are the ATI All In Wonder line of AGP cards. You can get better if you're willing to spend 4 figures on something else. They won't work in Linux, which is a limited OS for restoration. We know that AGP motherboards are really scarce, so there is a list of recommended alternates for non-AGP systems:
-
Hauppauge 610 USB2 capture stick ~$50
-
ATI TV Wonder HD 600 USB2 capture stick ~$50-100
- ATI TV Wonder HD 600 PCI capture card (aka
Diamond ATI TV Wonder HD 600 PCI capture card ~$50-100
- ATI TV Wonder HD 650 PCI capture card aka
Diamond ATI TV Wonder HD 650 PCI capture card ~$50-100 (
not the USB versions! Stay away from the USB versions of these products. Consider yourself warned).
For frame-level external tbc's, two that are easiest to find are the AVT-8710 and the TBC-1000. No TBC is perfect. Their function is to clean the frame sync timing to avoid dropped or inserted frames and to maintain correct audio sync. They also defeat Macrovision. There are other frame tbc's around, many of them well-used shop-level units that require expertise and advanced support hardware.
The other type of tbc that is essential is a line-level tbc, either built-in with higher-end VCR's or found in pass-thru units that are almost as effective. You'll find many threads that discuss products used as pass-thru line tbc's. They will not undo Macrovision. Their function is to correct the line-by-line output within individual video frames. Bad scanline timing creates geometric distortion and other obvious problems due to irregular scanline output. This problem can't be fixed with frame-level tbc's, nor is there any way possible to fix them after capture.
The question often asked is "Can I just capture without the line tbc foolishness and still get good results? No, you can't. And the older and worse the tape, the worse are the problems. Scanline errors are not rare; they're as common as VHS tape noise, which looks worse without a line tbc.
Below are links to 2 samples of scanline errors. The tape was played with a non-tbc VCR. While the bad demo looks like a severe case, it's not as uncommon as you'd think. This sort of top-border flagging and frame slippage happens often with old tapes. Some tapes will play without this severity, some won't.
-
A1_Sample2_bad.mpg is the original capture encoded to MPEG, with frame size slightly reduced to prevent TV overscan from hiding some of the problems.
-
B1_Sample2_fix.mpg is the tape played with a line tbc pass-thru device.The "fixed" sample shown is a first-stage test repair with only basic denoising, improved afterwards with a better VCR, but here addressing only specific issues. The tape is no longer available.
A less severe but more common example of line "wiggles" produced by typical scanline errors is here:
http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/3...=1#post1882662.
For the best results in the entire workflow from capture to repair, to color correction, thru edits, timeline, encoding, authoring, burning to disc, VHS is captured via a device designed for analog sources. It is captured to lossless YUY2 digital media using lossless compressors like
huffyuv or Lagarith to reduce file size. The audio portion is captured as uncompressed PCM. Lossless encoding means just what it says: lossless. You can modify a losslessly compressed video, make all kinds of changes to it, and recompress it without the damage inflicted by lossy re-encoding. Encoding to lossy formats (DVD, BluRay, AVCHD, and lossy encoded containers such as mp4, mkv, etc.) are the very last step in the conversion process.
An important question to ask yourself:
what are my expectations? VHS captured to any digital media still looks like VHS. It doesn't look like DVD. Nor is it "improved" by directly encoding it to a digital format like DVD -- encoding noisy VHS directly to lossy encoded MPEG or h.264 often looks worse than the original. You get the original VHS noise and defects, plus added to it are digital compression artifacts caused by that noise. In any case, it can't look better than the original. But it can be vastly improved by capturing to lossless media and using some fairly common methods for cleanup before encoding. It depends on how much you put into it.
When people say "VHS to DVD" they sometimes mean recording VHS directly to a DVD recorder or DVD encoder card. That works, if you will, although even the so-so DVD recorders of today can make a better video than a cheap VHS-to-DVD capture device. Older recorders from 2004-2006 are many levels better than new ones. The best DVDR's used LSI processing chips with decent digital denoising -- decent, yes, but far from great, primitive compared with post-process filters today, and given to ghosting and motion smear.
Among several other similar threads, an earlier post in a thread 9 months ago asked the same question you've asked: "
Want to capture VHS tapes to Hard drive: what equipment to buy?".
One answer:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...html#post38540
More comments are in this post:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/video-capture/6778-ati-600-fix.html#post40234
and the post that follows it in the same thread:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...html#post40237
General notes on VHS to lossless vs
not-recommended VHS to DV capture:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...html#post39752 and a following post that discusses line-level and frame-level tbc's:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...html#post39774
