Hi all,
Really appreciate all the information on this site and guidance from lordsmurf and all.
I'm starting a transfer project of a pile of tapes that were tucked away at my parents', around 40 tapes in total with a mix of Video8 and Hi8 tapes. The final videos will be shared with family primarily through private YouTube playlists, and possibly DVD. I'll keep a backed up hard drive with the masters. I plan to upscale the videos destined for YouTube to HD, just to make use of it's higher HD bitrate.
My chain is a Sony TRV65E camcorder -> AED CDM660 (as TBC when needed) -> ATI AIW 9000 Pro AGP & M-Audio 2496 ->
VirtualDub HuffYUV, running on XP SP3.
I've set up the levels as best I can, with a little dip below 16 for the blacks and the highlights no brighter than 235 (set with crop on).
I have had a few issues with the colour however, the saturation seems too high but unlike with the histogram I'm not entirely sure how to make sure I don't clip the chroma signal, if that's a risk? So I've wound the levels Saturation control down to 100 (from the 128 mid point) as this looks more reasonable. I'd rather trust a graph but I haven't found anything that can be checked realtime while capturing in
VirtualDub. However, viewing the video in a vectorscope after capture seemed to show that all colour information was retained and appeared to be recoverable in colour correction.
Attached is a sample of the capture with one of the worst offending clips - highly saturated reds yet still apparently legal on the VirtualDub histogram. The original recording was over-exposed, too yellow, and the reds were blown out. I've tried my best to recover it, but appreciate the over-exposure is not recoverable!
The second attachment is after I've run it through QTGMC deinterlacer and a little colour correction in Resolve, then cropped and transcoded to H264 in Handbrake. (my thought was to store the high quality H264 cropped, and then if I need to put it back on DVD, I'll add borders to bring it back to 720 x 576)
I was wondering if I could get any opinion on the quality/colour, and if it seems in the ballpark? I don't particularly want to spend hours on each scene but am happy to make a basic overall adjustment for each tape if it's adequate.
Does this all seem like I'm on the right track?
Thanks all!
Dave P