Misinformation spouted by TechTVusa on YouTube?

[dpalomaki]

Looking at some schematics of legacy gear from the 1980s/90s that included digital processing on conjunction with analog tape I see some cut corners and used 6-bit processing for chroma, not 8-bit. The natural dot blur of CRT display, noise, and dithering essentially masked the artifacts that would otherwise be apparent. I suspect some DV gear retained the reduced bit depth processing because it "worked" back then; it hid the flaws in the image.

I believe some more recent flat screen and LCD/LED computer monitors did less than full bit depth signal processing as well, discarding the least significant bits to save a few cents production cost.

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What's next? "Phone booths are better than cell phones!"

Yes, if one needs to change into their super hero costume.

[lordsmurf]

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Originally Posted by dpalomaki

Yes, if one needs to change into their super hero costume.

Ha!

How does Superman change now?

[Gary34]

Haha he block/hide Capturing-Memories, vhsvcrbest, and lordsmurf because your comments are confusing and he gave some other reasons in a comment. That’s kinda funny. He was the one calling ppl out. He blocks everyone that really knows what they’re talking about. No one cussed and everyone was polite. You guy’s are a bunch of trouble makers I guess lol.

[lordsmurf]

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Originally Posted by Gary34

Haha he block/hide Capturing-Memories, vhsvcrbest, and lordsmurf because your comments are confusing and he gave some other reasons in a comment. That’s kinda funny. He was the one calling ppl out. He blocks everyone that really knows what they’re talking about. No one cussed and everyone was polite. You guy’s are a bunch of trouble makers I guess lol.

In general, I vehemently dislike the term snowflake, but that's exactly what this babygdav/TechTVusa person is. He's a complete assclown that peddles misinformation, distorts facts, obviously due to not actually having knowledge of the subject material. When confronted, he initially doubles down, before eventually crumpling like tissue paper. So he's gone for the moment, like an insect in winter. His ilk is nothing new to the video community. Every 5-10 years is some new "it" nonsense, but DV is the cockroach that won't be snuffed out. Sadly, he'll probably be back.

I don't understand why he can't simply say "I wanted cheap and easy, even if quality takes a hit, so I got this $200 DV box". And there are many valid reasons for going down that DV path (PAL, Mac, budget, etc), and indeed it is a path I've sometimes suggested to others. But it's very case-by-case, not something that should ever be general advice. It has downsides, sometimes severe.

What I don't like seeing is his BS about it being "bestest ever!", "nobody can tell the difference", etc. Again, classic defending the purchase mindset. So misleading to others.

Again, in general, DV really has no place in an NTSC capture workflow in the 2020s. Nor really PAL, even if more tolerable. It's neither cheap enough for cheapskates, nor quality enough for quality seekers willing to spend good money on gear.

Thanks for making this thread.

[Gary34]

Believe it or not that guy deleted all of you guys’s comments and mine. Lordsmurf, Capturing-Memories, vcrvhsbest and now he has deleted my comments too. What is the point of deleting those? You guys left a bunch of well informed good comments. I just called him out on deleting comments and wrote a little negative stuff. Really it’s an easy subject for you guys to pick apart. You guy’s destroyed him in the comments section so he just wanted to get rid of all the evidence. Then his video is still up where he’s saying all that crap. He’s supposed to put up a follow up video. The comment that he made saying he block/hid all of you three’s comments is gone so it just looks like none of us left any comments and all that didn’t happen. That guy is a joke.

[lordsmurf]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gary34

Believe it or not that guy deleted all of you guys’s comments and mine. Lordsmurf, Capturing-Memories, vcrvhsbest and now he has deleted my comments too. What is the point of deleting those? You guys left a bunch of well informed good comments. I just called him out on deleting comments and wrote a little negative stuff. Really it’s an easy subject for you guys to pick apart. You guy’s destroyed him in the comments section so he just wanted to get rid of all the evidence. Then his video is still up where he’s saying all that crap. He’s supposed to put up a follow up video. The comment that he made saying he block/hid all of you three’s comments is gone so it just looks like none of us left any comments and all that didn’t happen. That guy is a joke.

Do you now see why Youtube is so full of misinformation?

The "content creators" are allowed to simply remove comments that disagree with them. The intention is to remove spam or harassment, but clearly it's abused.

That guy is a giant wuss, a fragile little snowflake, that cannot stand it when others disagree with him, or point out his errors and weird bias for aged tech.

Look at my post history, on multiple sites, going back 30 years. I'll gladly debate anything, but with facts/truth, or at least opinions based on facts/truth. When I'm wrong, I say so. But I generally abide by the ideal of keeping my mouth shut when I don't know something. That's why I tend to be very confident in my information and answers: experience, knowledge, sometimes educated guesses (and stated as such).

Sadly, most people don't understand that principle, and all you get is pulled-from-ass misinformation.

BTW, I can still see my own comments there:

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Again, you're mixing up so many concepts that it's a jumbled mess of facts, half-facts, and false info.

No, post houses did not use ATI AIW, those were intended for the high end hobby video community that wanted lossless, but did not need or want the costly SCSI RAID SDI lossless editing systems as used by post houses. But post houses also didn't use low-end Canopus DV boxes made for 1990s wedding videographers.

In fact, Canopus was mostly mid-range to low-end NLE cards until the Grass Valley buyout. At that time, GV used the Canopus branding for some GV products, back in the days where you often had mixed HD, SD, digital, and analog content, and in a live camera environment. So having XLR doesn't make it "pro" whatsoever, but merely for a live camera setting with mics and mixers. Further note that some lack TBCs, but have genlocks for that reason.

Matrox was the Canopus competitor, often edging them out with the RT NLE cards. Canopus was beaten down by Matrox, and the failure of 3dfx (it's graphics partner), sold off and the carcass picked apart by Grass Valley.. Matrox was pushed out of the market by ATI. Unlike Canopus, Matrox is still around, though most now with very high end cards, both video and industrial.

The pre-AMD ATI Theatre chips replaced entire 90s chipsets, and was a breakthrough. Remember, ATI of yesteryear was like Nvidia of today. To call ATI "crap" then is like calling Nvidia "crap" now, and almost nobody will agree with you. Sadly, AMD gutted ATI for their in-house iGPU needs, and Theatre was cast aside. More gamer graphics, no room for video.

Sometimes you had to be there, to know the facts of the era. Google only gets you so far.

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Yes, correct, XLR and BNC gear is for pro sources, not consumer videotape formats like VHS. That's exactly it. The gear is not interchangeable, not one-size-fits-all. Pro gear, pro sources.

For consumer sources, you had pro gear specifically designed for consumer sources (like some DataVideo, not Blackmagic), advanced prosumer / serious hobbyist gear (ATI, Cypress), and low end consumer crap from China that borks image quality.

Uncompressed needed SCSI RAID to prevent I/O drops. Lossless codecs were mostly in a post-DV post-SDI capture world, newly opened to the masses in an affordable $300 ATI AIW card. Not the $1k+ RT cards, or the lossy similar-cost DV boxes. ATI gave you both MPEG (DVD-Video up to lower broadcast depth) and lossless/uncompressed AVI.

Post houses were not okay with MiniDV / DV25. It was tolerable, nothing more. Eventually it was rejected. Shooting video is not the same as lossy conversion. Shooting loss is starting from (essentially) 4:4:4, while starting from color-under (4:2:2'ish) VHS is wholly different. Again, you keep mixing up concepts. Shooting is not conversion.

ATI AIW was not intended for NLE. But you glossed over something important here. Matrox and Canopus realtime was on the way out, and in fact DVstorm and RT.X cards were discontinued long before ATI AIW reached end-of-life. The P4 CPU was fast enough in the 00s to not need hardware assist anymore for real-time preview. That ended with Premiere 5.x and Pentium III, and the 6.x RT card updates were worthless. AIW essentially replaced NLE cards, and freed us to use other NLEs, such as then-newcomer Vegas Video. We were no longer locked to Edius and Premiere, nor Avid for costly editing systems.

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Just to clarify some, I don't recall a true lossless codec prior to Huffyuv. The 90s JPEG "lossless" was still arguably lossy due to off-spec encoders, somewhat worse than ProRes422, another DCT image compression unlike Huffman based data compression. The first, simple, and still the best.

That opened up not just PCIe and USB, but AGP and PCI before it. But those are just the comm method, the card itself is important.

When I started, it was either uncompressed or MPEG-1. The MPEG-1 was lousy, but still required powerful SGI using Solaris and MediaBase. Yes, I was exposed to streaming media in its infancy. Those servers sounded like jet engines. The uncompressed required a workstation that was even louder, almost as costly. I know the HDD were 15k rpm, but no longer remember the drive sizes. But it was "big" for the era, server drives. Now that you mention it, I do vaguely remember D-1 tapes on-site. But we're talking 25+ years ago, I just do not recall details. I do remember junking D-1 and maybe D-2 tapes in the 2000s, ancient promo backups. We no longer maintained players, MPEG-2 copies were retained, and those tapes were in the way. It was nifty to be around in those days, but home conversion was simply not feasible, and with quality, until ATI AIW (and TBCs made for consumer analog sources, along with the best JVC/Panasonic VCRs).

DV really had no place in a quality workflow, then or now.

... and others.

His comments look really stupid now, you can tell the he's replying to comments he deleted.

[Gary34]

Yeah I see what you’re saying now about YouTube being a bad source of knowledge. I didn’t know expect him to block/hide all of you guys’s comments just because they were intelligent. Then he said he did it because “most viewers” wouldn’t understand what you guys were talking about. Not because he didn’t understand. That’s an ego thing. He thinks he’s an expert in this because he did something to do with television work a long time ago. He doesn’t want factual information or he wouldn’t delete you guys’s comments. He would look into them. He would gather information. I guess his response is predictable once you figure out he has a huge ego and he’s really stubborn which became obvious when you guy’s confronted him with facts. That guy is definitely a blue piller. The ironic thing is that he was trying to say that you guys were stating myths when actually in the comments he said that the ADVC 110 had an integrated chip that kept everything at 29.97 fps. Vcrvhsbest pointed out that that chip doesn’t exist and you need a frame TBC for that. All of his points were either pointed out as bad practices or just myths in the guide on this site.

It is predictable that people won’t get good information when searching it on YouTube. YouTube’s algorithm isn’t designed to give people the best hardware or software advice. It’s especially bad to look at YouTube with this topic though. I would have been better off skipping YouTube for sure. I’ve captured with easycrap, intensity shuttle and now in recapturing with good gear but I’ve seen the results and how difficult premier was to work with and the audio lag from not having a frame TBC also a lot of stuff I didn’t pick out due to lack of knowledge. It’s enough to finally make you wanna take the red pill but if someone takes that sooner they’d be better off.

Anyways that guy’s the one actually spouting out myths.

[lordsmurf]

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Originally Posted by Gary34

It’s enough to finally make you wanna

... smack guys like that in the face with a VCR.

[Gary34]

Lol. He will just try to cover it up and deny that it happened. He’s sweeping up vcr pieces with a red face. I didn’t get hit in the face with a vcr.

[dpalomaki]

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YouTube being a bad source of knowledge.

I would say more a unreliable source, mixed source. Some info is bad and some is good, with no real way to vet it beyond one's own personal knowledge and combined with some common sense. Youtube itself is by and large neutral (politics aside) - just a delivery method. The individual posters are good, bad, and in between.

I have found both good and bad information, and some that was good within a very narrow sphere and not applicable outside that limited sphere.

Let the buyer beware.

[Gary34]

You’re right but common sense on this subject isn’t that common.