This is actually an easy question to answer.
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Originally Posted by LoftyGoals
I find myself with money and VHS tapes I want to digitize
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That will allow for the tools needed.
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This simply requires that you acquire the proper tools, no messing around with budget options, or the "duct tape and chicken wire" (aka cheapskate) methods. A large part of quality conversion is simply acquiring the proper tools. People waste time, even risk their sanity, by attempting wrong tools, wrong methods. Projects are much easier, and faster, with proper tools. This is true of almost anything, not just video.
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I'm also an electrical engineer and a software engineer and a general nerd so building the rack and running it is going to be a DIY affair.
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This will make things easier to understand, especially anything on the computer end (capture card, drivers, OS). Somewhat the video, tech analytical mind is helpful.
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My goal is to preserve the analog signal from the tapes and onto a hard drive that I will deal with later on an as-needed basis.
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That means lossless.
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Generally, I'm trying to figure out which part of the conversion workflow I absolutely need to do while I have the physical tapes.
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The capture part.
VCR > TBC > capture card. Not just any random item, but specific units known to give the quality you needed, such as JVC/Panasonic VCR with line TBC, DataVideo/Cypress type TBC in verified working condition, capture card known to not mess with values. And above all, stay away from eBay, sinkhole of gambling, wasted time, and lying/incompetent sellers.
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Clearly I need a good S-VHS unit or two and a capture card. But then I wonder:
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With VCR line TBC, and external frame TBC.
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Is there an approach that will digitize _most_ of the raw material
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Lossless captures.
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I need with the expectation that I'll have to re-digitize some percentage of the tapes?
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There actually should not be such an expectation. With the proper tools, proper methods, this can be a one-and-done project.
In fact, some tapes are failing at this late date (mostly 70s and early 80s VHS tapes), and one more good play is all that is left. The same, second play, will have massive issues, due to micro-oxide shed. (Not full oxide shed, but tiny flakes that are hard to see, and yet obvious on the video as noise patterning.) So one-and-done should be a goal these days, not playing repeatedly.
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Are there issues I can only detect during correction that require the source tapes to correct?
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Only if the capture was bad, perhaps tracking drifted mid-tape, or multiple recordings from different devices caused different track/alignment issues. Usually, when a tape started to capture fine, it stays fine. Not always, but I'd say at least 80% of the time. It really depends on your tapes.
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Do I have to hand-review the results to know which VCR to use?
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Before capture, to know what VCR to use?
Not usually. In fact, rarely. Just stay around for the first minute or two, then let it go, you can leave. But best to monitor it every 10 minutes or so.
When done, you can dump into
VirtualDub, scrub faster than realtime (aka preview at 3x-10x speed). This can take a few minutes per tape, but better than hours of realtime watching. That's how you proof the capture. Be sure to test sample audio, don't just watch video.
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Can the secondary TBC be done later?
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No.
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Or, more generally if you had a pile of VHS tapes, you wanted to preserve them with as little manual intervention as possible, and money and disk space were no object (barring multiple copies of each tape), how would you do it?
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recommended JVC S-VHS VCR with line TBC >
> the best DataVideo/Cypress frame TBC
> the best capture card for the OS
... and from a reputable source, refurb'd units. Again, no messing about with this.
Time is more valuable than people realize. And time has a financial cost. Saving money here can waste potential money there. Too many people fall prey to negative economics.
I want:
- faithful quality to the actual source (not degraded quality from bad gear)
- time management
- heat mitigation
And you seem to mostly want the same.
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Originally Posted by traal
Not with a video capture card because it uses the timebase information to create the frames, then tosses it away. In theory, you would need something like this, then apply some sort of TBC filter in software.
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None of that is viable now, and probably not for years. In terms the OP may understand, it's "not production ready".