DanHendleyDigital setup problems?
 

Here’s his video https://youtu.be/qwvFWUMLYRI

Here is his price chart https://danhendleydigital.com/digitizationn

First off the guy making the video seems nice and he’s trying to be upfront about his workflow. That being said what a strange workflow for someone charging 100 bucks a tape for some tapes. He says his workflow and prices in the comments. I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with 100 dollars for a tape of you are doing a bunch but 100 dollars is way too much for something that involves a Retrotink and an Elgato.

His workflow is JVC S9600U, Retrotink 5x, and Elgato HD60X. The Elgato captures into OBS.

He actually got kind of an expensive setup just not a good one. The Retrotink is $325 and the Elgato is around 170.

Feels like if you're charging over $100 for everything, meaning both capture and restoration work, you should probably just be able to afford a proper prosumer setup.

I don't get why trimming blank space is a premium option, that's something I do by default. Actually looks like what options are in the basic plan seems to be stuff his workflow would automatically do. He's probably capturing deinterlaced mp4 videos.

He could theoretically buying a refurbished Panasonic AG-1980 from Aramkolt by doing just 12 tapes.

I get why that's more expensive since you're spending extra time doing restoration work, but still

I dunno man, I myself do always restoration work and give the clients the restored mp4 copies, but that's because I feel like the people I'm doing this for wouldn't know what the heck to do with a raw avi file.

I keep the raw files myself though for everything, personal tapes, retails, other people's family videos, etc.

I've seen his video, he does come across as honest and more trustworthy than other YouTubers at least.

It's just with the amount of money he is potentially making, there should be no reason not to purchase better equipment.

His workflow cost isn’t really far off of a prosumer setup. His Elgato cost the same as what a recommended capture card cost. He has a recommended VCR.

It would be bad to pay 100 for a tape that will have big problems like audio desync and dropped frames.

Think what is worse is that it's being deinterlaced and upscaled at a hardware level for 'efficiency'

You're capturing a pre-proccessed video, not a raw interlaced 480i YUV file.

Alas this stuff in time consuming, so something like decode certainly ain't going to fly for them.

The deinterlacing would look a lot worse if it was something with more motion and you can’t change deinterlacing parameters if you are doing it in hardware. It’s a one size fits all.

To me it looks like he lost detail in the shadows when he made his changes. Maybe he went a little overboard with it.

It’s a little strange how something has been around for this long and instead of getting gear that was designed for this task they get a video game upscaler, HDMI capture card, and streaming software.

Yeah it's like the perfect gear if you want to be a streamer or let's player, basically anything that requires video game console capture.

This ain't it for video tape capture