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.

Quote:

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]

Quote:

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]

Quote:

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.

-- merged --

I just wanted to update this because I’m someone who followed that guy then found digitalfaq. I can capture now without dropping or inserting frames and I have low CPU usage. The capture process is enjoyable now. I bought no new computer hardware either. I’m utilizing the stuff I already had better like I am capturing to my 720 RPM HDD instead of one of my SSDs and I’m going to calibrate my IPS. A lot of the YouTube guides are push this then this where this place gives you information to really learn what’s going on. It was easier for me to learn what I was doing wrong and fix it then it would have been to sit there and struggle more with bad hardware, software and other problems I didn’t know about.

[aramkolt]

I think TechTVUSA does make some fair points. I don't think he's trying to be malicious. He wants proof (not promises) that there's a visually significant difference between readily available plug and play solutions that will work with modern Macs in particular. I don't think he's claiming that the ADVC-110 is going to give the best quality of any possible conversion chain on all video sources or that it is for archive-level transfers.

Main thing I think he gets wrong is not stressing enough that the Shuttle really can't be relied upon as a single device to capture due to time base error intolerance unless you have decent equipment in front of it in the chain, which most aren't going to have.

These points I think he gets right about the ADVC-110:

-ADVC-110 is superior to what *most general consumers* are already using for their home movie captures - Think Elgato Video Capture/Clearclick (at least if using it with the bundled software) - many "professional" services actually use the Elgato Video Capture - There are several YouTube channels showing this - GotMemories and EmeraldCoastDigitizing come to mind. GotMemories does have pretty high google user reviews I must say - 4.9 stars on Facebook and 5.0 stars on google reviews with several hundred reviews on each. If most people (in general) weren't happy with "Elgato level" quality at super low bitrates, those reviews wouldn't be as high as they are. And they are paying a minimum of $30 per tape at least over at GotMemories.

-ADVC-110 is driverless on modern hardware and never has audio sync issues. No external hardware or fussing with audio settings required.

-He basically begged for anyone here to do a head to head challenge with what is suggested here vs the ADVC-110 with sample videos and have that posted to YouTube to prove him wrong - this STILL has not been posted to YouTube to my knowledge. If it has been posted by anyone here, I'd love the link.

Conclusion: For a plug and play solution for 95% of users that'll be an improvement over what they'd otherwise be using (Elgato video capture with bundled software) - particularly for Mac users that aren't interested in using Windows (and there's plenty of those) - the ADVC-110 does have a place in video digitization for the average Mac user in my mind.

I have a bunch of capture cards including recommended ones here as well as the ADVC-110 and I will eventually post that comparison to YouTube myself. I think it would be more interesting to initially not label what each sample is at first and see what the community votes as best overall capture on something like a Reddit poll. One could argue that YouTube compression will dull details, but most people will be sharing their captured content via YouTube or similar, so the conclusion of "which makes for best YouTube-destined capture" would be the more accurate conclusion there.

[lordsmurf]

No, he's trying to be intentionally obtuse, as he has removed comments from myself and others that gave him the "proof" he claimed to seek. Those comments also pointed out the problems in his very own samples, as well as obvious problems in his assertions. He's a low-knowledge user spouting BS that only newbies or other low-knowledge users believe. Education is the cure to all.

The ADVC boxes are 1990s technology. It butchers color, and adds blocks. In the 2020s, it's as inexcusable as an Easycap (Easycrap) USB stick from China. Only in certain narrow cases do I begrudgingly nod my head in approval -- much like Dr. Strange in Avengers, "it's the only way". That's when all other avenues of conversion have been exhausted, and it presents as the least-worst option in the scenario.

There are some "meme cards" in recent times, such as the GV-USB2 and Live2. Those are not suggested cards, with documented concerns and problems of their own. And yet, still better than DV boxes (Canopus, DataVideo, and some others). So there are options between lousy DV and lousy Easycaps, that are less/not lousy.

I'd even consider vhs-decode before I would a DV box. It has problems, but it's better than DV. Both methods will require you to tear apart gear, fiddle and futz with adapters and parts. Install this, tweak that, reinstall that, re-tweak this. If that's how you want your capture experience to be, knock yourself out. Capturing, and with quality results, does not have to be that difficult.

No, a Reddit poll is just random people, with random opinions, based on random data (good or bad) or even no data. Surveys without vetting are completely worthless, and generally bias to the question or unqualified expected outcome. Just this morning, I was reading about a survey of college seniors, where they could not determine what a good starting salary would be in their field. Some thought $15k was good (ridiculous), while others thought $250k was not enough (ridiculous). And that was a survey of an audience that should know the topic more than the average person!

Youtube is only a small % of the overall video ecosystem. And it's the junk food (Twinkies, chips, candy bars), the fast food (McDonald's, Taco Bell), of the video industry. It's largely low-quality user-generated content, and was not even profitable until recent times. A single movie, from a single studio, can dwarf Youtube in terms of content success, quality, etc. In terms of financials, Youtube made $30B revenue in all of 2023. By contrast, Disney's The Marvels made "only" $47B revenue and was considered a flop, widely panned. Perspective matters. So this Youtuber is a tiny pimple on a gnat's ass.

I'm pragmatic when it comes to video. It is what it is. And it isn't what it isn't. This dude ain't it.

[Gary34]

I was just giving an update but maybe I shouldn’t of revived this thread. IDK about the ADVC I haven’t tried it before. Anyways he put out a video talking about myths that digitalfaq spreads but he tells people that there is a TBC chip in his ADVC 110 and he thinks digitalfaq is spreading myths.

He had a video over the shuttle and he uses a 500 dollar Hi-8 camera with a TBC built in, which is the same camera he shot the videos he’s capturing with, to show that he can capture with the shuttle and he uses brand new VHS tapes that he freshly records from premier pro to the tape so that the shuttle functions for him to capture VHS. He does mention in the video that the only way he is able to capture with the shuttle is by doing all that but then he tells me hey you need to get a TBC in your VCR for that to work. He doesn’t say hey I don’t have a TBC in my VCR and I haven’t tried that. He just ignores frame TBCs and thinks of audio delay as strictly a card issue. He was a know it all. He would rather give advice on something that he hasn’t tried himself, hasn’t heard from a reputable source and doesn’t really know about then he would just say idk. I asked him about that later and he said his HI8 tapes got out of sync after about 30 minutes. For some reason he uses a DV codec with the shuttle in that video. Some of mine were in DV. I saw how the colors behaved too and I was thinking wtf. Premier crashed constantly and I had my three SSDs set up for different things. One was for scratch, one had my files and premier then one for my OS. When I tried to play my timeline back in Premier it would really struggle and with corrections it wouldn’t play back at all.

It really was my fault for following him and not looking into stuff. There’s a lot of misleading people on YouTube. Some people wind up here after they struggle or after there videos horrible. They don’t sugarcoat stuff here but I’m liking my results now. YouTube can be good for some things. It’s not good for VHS transfer strategies. There such a huge amount of misinformation on this topic. There’s a big lack of education. Marketing feeds on that lack of education. It’s tempting to go with that information because it looks easy. For me from first hand experience this is the easy way out of the two by far.

Showing my old videos that I made back then and my videos I am making now and saying this is the difference between the methods would be very misleading to some people because it doesn’t tell the whole story. That’s part of why he was misleading to me is because he showed a video of his cherry picked source and I didn’t know anything about timebase errors. The videos I got out of that method back then were a pain. If I just show the video if doesn’t show all the issues I had. I can warn people a lot better with telling my experience then I can with a video. All the little advice that you get over here really adds up to make things smoother. Now things are just push button and capture. Playback is smooth as ice. My CPU usage is in the singles teens and twentys. It’s nice. I’m listening to people that actually know what there talking about and correct each other so that I’m getting very good information.

[lordsmurf]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gary34

he tells people that there is a TBC chip in his ADVC 110

And because it cannot be said enough, ADVC boxes do not have any frame time base correction whatsoever.

The ADVC-300 model has a very weak line TBC, that generally does nothing, or actually makes the video quality worse. It's based on a beta-quality Panasonic chip, with later mature iterations used in the ES recorders.

Furthermore "audio lock"* is Canopus marketing, and does not mean audio sync cannot be lost. ADVC boxes are not special, not magic, and can (and do) lose sync like any other capture card, when proper frame TBCs are not in use. And can (and do) lose dropped/inserted frames (which are silent, zero reporting capability).

* One must first understand there is not a single "DV", but rather multiple variations. Professional/non-consumer DV (DV50, DVCAM, etc) has an optional feature called "audio lock" which is essentially a digital genlock of sorts. Digital audio samples can waiver, and it was a problem for offline and online (NLE) editors in the 90s. Adam Wilt still has a long article about audio lock online. DV25 lacks any such features. Wilt was only covering DV in a strict vacuum, and some DV cameras of the time. DV was never made for digital ingest of sources like VHS, so that added another layer of complexity beyond what was even discussed there. So whatever Canopus did was likely a simple clock, PLL at most (I doubt it), zero true locking. Not that it mattered, as that "locking" had no effect on digitizing external analog sources. The term "audio lock" was clearly misunderstood by Canopus marketing, and it still gets parroted around by low-knowledge DV lovers in the 2020s from time to time. For the most part, the dumb myth of "Canopus ADVC doesn't lose sync" disappeared by the late 00s, when most newbies realized they were BS'd, and had to re-capture their tapes. By then Canopus was long gone, bought out and liquidated by Grass Valley for their non-consumer tech.

[Gary34]

Another thing I don’t like about YouTube as far as capture methods is it is new people learning from new people. Here you can see how long people have been there and see if everyone is correcting there previous post and figure out who to listen to. Lordsmurf, latreche, Sanlyn, Dpalomaki, Lollo and some other should be listened to. New members like me and dramkolt really are still learning and shouldn’t be giving out advice to new people and if we do it should be taken with a grain of salt.

[Aya_Rei]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gary34

Another thing I don’t like about YouTube as far as capture methods is it is new people learning from new people. Here you can see how long people have been there and see if everyone is correcting there previous post and figure out who to listen to. Lordsmurf, latreche, Sanlyn, Dpalomaki, Lollo and some other should be listened to. New members like me and dramkolt really are still learning and shouldn’t be giving out advice to new people and if we do it should be taken with a grain of salt.

Just replying to say that I totally agree here. I remember following one of those YouTube videos that recommended an Elgato capture card, digitized my first few tapes with that and a crummy Panasonic PV-V4611 VCR. While it "worked" the results were pretty bad and compressed, I do remember horizontal wiggling occurring thanks to a line TBC not being in use.

After feeling like the quality I've was getting from that method wasn't good enough and didn't do those precious tapes any justice. I caved in and bought a workflow from Lordsmurf a few months ago. While it costed a lot of money and time, it has all been worth it in the end, being the perfect equipment for the job of digitizing VHS and Video8 tapes and being equipment that I know will allow me to capture them in the best possible quality they can be before going through with giving them light restoration work.

[latreche34]

Most of us don't have ADVC boxes to make the comparaison he is looking for, He can feel free to check my youtube channel, but I'm not gonna go out of my way and buy an ADVC box to challenge him. I had used a similar device before, the Edirol VMC-1 for PAL VHS-C tapes, it is actually miles better than any Grass valley box, but the captures looked like shit, That was the reason I got into this hobby, to do a proper re-capture of all my family tapes.

[lordsmurf]

Quote:

Originally Posted by latreche34

Most of us don't have ADVC boxes to make the comparaison he is looking for, He can feel free to check my youtube channel, but I'm not gonna go out of my way and buy an ADVC box to challenge him.

To clarify my holdings, I have:

- Canopus ADVC-300
- Canopus ADVC-100
- Canopus / Grass Valley ADVC-110
- DataVideo DAC-100
- VMC-1

.... and many other capture cards. 100+ cards, easy. From all over the world, from the 90s to 2020s. So I can compare quite a bit.

I do comparisons for my own reasons, to my own timelines. I do advanced video things that people of this site (or any site) are not even aware of.

Sometimes I entertain request, time permitting. But generally not, as no extra time available.

What I don't do is make comparison videos because some nobody, on some site, demands I do so. They can piss off. Or pay for my time/services, which of course will never happen, because people of that ilk are just cheapskate windbags.

Quote:

I had used a similar device before, the Edirol VMC-1 for PAL VHS-C tapes, it is actually miles better than any Grass valley box, but the captures looked like shit, That was the reason I got into this hobby, to do a proper re-capture of all my family tapes.

Yes, you are 100% correct, the VMC-1 is vastly better than the Canopus boxes, but it's still just DV for internal encoding.

Notes:
- not Mac compatible
- Macrovision respected (not ignored), image darkens to almost pure blackness

[latreche34]

Yes, I'm aware you have some DV boxes, I was talking about the rest of us who most of don't have such devices.