Are these artifacts due to bad caps? (Seems like a great sample video topic)
 

I've done some searching for info on how to diagnose video artifacts and have come up dry. I always assumed that 30 year old VHS video issues were most likely due to aging tape... but now wonder if it's just bad caps in my deck.

How would I know?


I've attached a raw capture sample from my workflow (AG-5710 with TBC on -> JVC BR-DV600U, S-Video->firewire)


There's some obvious color streaking, and moire patterns. I've done nothing to filter etc... hoping to improve the raw capture before other tweaks.


Is there a summary somewhere of the impact of bad caps in a deck? All I've seen is "bad caps, so recap" and people are happy afterwards.

It's hard to tell capturing to DV then converting to h.264, Post a lossless AVI clip straight from S-Video. Do all tapes exhibit the same artifacts?

I can't find the clip I recorded of it right now but I've had bad caps in a head amp in a VCR (A sanyo-made Nokia VCR) cause noisy/bad chroma yeah. Bad caps can also cause wavy patterns, noise patterns, smearing (video coupling capacitors in particular) and other effects depending on where in the circuit they are. Bad caps in servo circuits can cause odd tracking behaviour and similar. Bad caps in digital circuits will cause especially notable effects.

Oops! My bad. Intended to use non-compressed and spaced on it. Here's an AVI. I don't have direct s-video capture capability right now :(


I've not yet allowed the deck to touch multiple tapes... I think I can find more junk tapes. good thought...

We now know it is not compression or DV related artifacts but not enough information to judge, Try different tapes especially tapes you know they worked fine before, also try a clean recording and play it back, Do you have other VCRs to compare? All this are part of the troubleshooting.