What do you think of the quality of my video?
 

Hi all,

First post on here, have been lurking for a while. I've been meaning to transfer all our home movies from when I was a kid for years. I finally bought an El Gato device and used it to transfer straight to our Mac. (worked flawlessly) I'm using an old Sharp VCR which is very basic but after reading on here was thinking of searching for a JVC Prosumer VCR for possibly improved image/audio quality. My Sharp VCR only has two AV cords coming out the back (red/white) for mono audio I believe.

Anyways, here's a home movie I just transferred last night from 1982. I wanted to get your opinion on the overall quality and if you think that investing in one of these more professional VCR's would improve the quality much. Or is it even worth bothering with?

Thanks for your advice!
Here's the video: http://vimeo.com/81103494

Please attach a sample in interlaced format instead. You can attach files up to 32MB, which should be plenty in DVD-spec MPEG-2 format. These video sharing sites add additional processing steps.

Cursory check: there are some dropped frames and a video breakup.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll try and upload a small sample of the video, I edit in iMovie so I'm not sure if the video will be in the interlaced format or not. Honestly I'm not looking for the highest professional quality but if you guys think this video quality is absolutely horrible and could be improved by utilizing a better VCR then I may make the investment.

I noticed the dropped frames and video breakup, I was thinking that was due to the camera being jostled around at the time. (it looked like that happened when my dad was walking with the camera) He bought one of the first consumer camcorders available at the time from Sears I believe) Was a monster, you had to carry a separate unit on your shoulder that housed the VCR tape. Can those dropped frames and video breakup be eliminated with a better VCR? Sorry if these questions are a little subjective, just curious.

Thanks!

It's a signal error caused by jostling the recorder while the tape is moving through it, but it should appear normal on a TV and other devices that are better able to deal with unstable video. Computer capture devices aren't particularly kind to VHS.

I have a tape showing the same issue when I was walking around with the camera, and it was an all-in-one full-size VHS camcorder from several years after yours. No skips or jumps at all when I hook my VCR up to my PC monitor's own S-Video input, but when I connect it to a similar USB capture stick I see those big breakups/horizontal field jumps.

It's likely correctable by adding a Panasonic DMR-ES10 / ES15 inline if you don't want to invest in a better VCR. I'm not seeing any other big issues with the video, at least from what can be judged by the Vimeo clip. It looks pretty good to me, other than the deinterlacing and compression. Obviously the colors could use some work, but you don't need a different VCR for that

One thing you definitely want to do is drop the right channel audio. Create a mono track from the left channel (or capture direct to mono if possible).

Vimeo will not work with Firefox for some dumb reason. Had to use Chrome.

The title editing was nice.
The color needs to be corrected, and there at least 2-3 segment with different color values. See 2-3 corrections.
Needs chroma NR. Camcorder denoise filter in VirtualDub.
Needs chroma shifts to correct color bleed. There's a filter for this in Avisynth.

We're working on an Avisynth primer now, but it'll be another month or two before that done. It's not easy to put together that many clips! :eek:

It's soft/blurry somewhat, but I think that was caused by Vimeo converting it.

You done a better than average job that I can see. :congrats:

I use Firefox almost exclusively; Vimeo's fine here on 25.0.1.