Modern AV to HDMI is now the best method?
Hello everyone! I'm Tyler, long time lurker first time poster. First let me just say that I greatly appreciate all the work and dedication the members of the board have contributed over the years and that I'm so glad there is still healthy activity on here. I'm a professional filmmaker, my background is primarily in digital cinema, I work with cameras like the RED Epic, and Canon C200, I work with formats like ProRes, DNxHD, Cinema DNG, etc, so I'm no stranger to bit rates, colour space, and I make a living from pixel peeping, but I'm not a tape expert by any means.
I've been tasked with digitising my families endless collection of 8mm and SVHS tapes. With my background in film and television production I do have a good base of knowledge for the specific formats and the basic do's and dont's of digitising, but I can't help but overthink things sometimes and was looking for your thoughts. From what I've gathered on here, the best home gamer solution is to find a good quality playback device (camera or deck) use S-Video cables whenever possible, use a decent Time Base Corrector (stand alone or integrated into one of the other devices in the chain) and capture with one of the all mighty ATI All in Wonder capture cards, amiright?... I've read all the evidence for why the ATI All in Wonder capture cards are still considered the best out there but I also know how quickly technology advances and that over a 20 year span the features of a card will be shrunk down and improved upon so much over the older versions and replaced by a single chip that now costs $1 to manufacture and will eventually be included in everything as standard. "Technology Connections," recently made a very interesting video about his capture method using a generic analog to digital video converter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZC5Zr3NC2PY An "upscaler" as they like to call it though good luck finding a data sheet that goes into any detail about what chips it uses or how it works. I've seen for my own eyes the result of some (not all, not most, but some) modern TV's taking analog video and it does appear that there is some mysterious chip that handles deinterlacing, time base correction, gamma, smoothing, noise reduction, etc etc, everything, and it looks to be about 95% of the quality possible from older formats like VHS or 8mm. So by today's standards following Moore's Law there is every possibility that a single $1 chip can now do everything and more for analog video compared to the methods of 20 years past and give us 95% (I say 95% because I don't want to be chased out of here by pitchforks) of the quality. Could this new generation of AV digitisers finally have unlocked a better method? Am I overthinking things? Has my friend from Technology Connections and I just not seen the light of the all mighty ATI all in Wonder cards? Does any of this really matter? Maybe I should be spending this time making new memories with my family instead of fruitlessly trying to preserve the old ones in the best quality possible? Alas... I am lost lol What do all of you think? Thanks! Tyler |
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Your experiences with cameras should (hopefully) give you an edge with the color work that is often needed for VHS. And you hopefully also understand the importance of calibration. Quote:
- recommended JVC/Panasonic S-VHS deck with line TBC - recommended Hi8 camera with line TBC > recommended DataVideo/Cypress external framesync TBC > recommended capture card, and you have some options here depending on OS Straying from the formula almost always results in a quality drop, often significant. And this is generally done only due to laziness/cheapness. Attempting to use so-called "modern" hardware is largely a foolish endeavor. LSI-based DVD recorders are also decent for DVD compressed versions. These days, DVD+archival is often done, a tandem capture, which creates both lossy copies to watch, and lossless to edit/restore/archive. Quote:
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I actually replied to that exact Youtube video: Quote:
Video myths and misinformation are a peeve of mine, and I am not kind towards it. :censor: Quote:
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Thank you so much lordsmurf for your prompt and detailed reply. I must say again how amazed I am at the wealth of knowledge on this forum and from it's members. It is great to see the legacy of the broadcast industry being preserved with such attention to detail.
I should have prefaced that my title of "Modern AV to HDMI is now the best method?" was mostly clickbait to get someone's attention to help stear me in the right direction. Please don't take offense to my accusations of old hardware, I was playing devil's advocate. I was very skeptical myself of the method used by Technology Connections but wanted to see what some experts thought. My family originally wanted to send all of our tapes off to Costco to have them transferred and I put a stop to that very quickly and decided to take over this as a pet project. The tapes have been stored very well, sealed in large ziplock bags and in a cool dry place for the last 20+ years. My dad said that he always recorded in SP for better quality and only bought the high end tapes from the Sony store, so I have confidence in the source material being good. As a present day professional filmmaker, I am very eager to play around with editing, colour correcting, and sharpening the raw footage myself. I am willing to spend a reasonable amount of money on hardware because at the end of the day one can always re-sell everything when finished hoping to break even, and certainly as much time as is needed. I'm also considering making my own YouTube video documenting the process to combat the cesspool of videos out there showing the wrong way to do things. I do have a couple more questions, and my apologies if they have already been asked on here over 9000 times before. My tapes are mostly a mix of Video8, Hi8 and a couple Digital8, so it appears that a Digital8 camera such as a more affordable Sony DCR-TRV240 that does have S-Video is probably my best one stop shop option for a playback device, correct? I can do Video8 and Hi8 through S-Video and Digital8 through Firewire to DV. Now the topic of a TBC, the manual for the Sony DCR-TRV240 does say it has one built in, is it any good? Would I be better off finding a stand alone TBC, and if so, what do you recomend? For a capture card, I don't mind going through the trouble of finding a good ATI All in Wonder and I do have a large collection of legacy PC hardware that I should be able to build a working system out of to use it. I happen to have a Kworld V-Stream TV tuner / capture card, it has S-Video, and it uses the Conexant Broadcast Decoder cx23883, but I've read mixed reviews on that particular model compared to the all mighty ATI All in Wonder cards. Thank you again for your time! Tyler |
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While I'd like to add videos to Youtube, I just do not have the time for it. Quote:
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Note that I dislike DV "capture"/transfer, too touchy. Consumer optics were craptastic, something you probably know as a pro shooter. So if you want to capture the DV as analog over s-video, you really don't lose any quality. The resolve of the consumer DV codecs and optics was arguably not 720x, just theoretical. Quote:
External framesync TBC corrects the signal. DataVideo/Cypress recommended, see marketplace subforum. You need both. Quote:
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Those A2D converters/upscalers are absolute CRAP. I'd look first at a decent S-VHS unit for playing back the tapes and start from there. The first thing you have to do is testing your tapes and see how good/bad they are. If they are in relatively good condition, a full frame TBC can be avoided. The line TBC within your S-VHS and any of the recommended DVD recorders will be more than enough. Buy an ATI AIW capture card (this is key to get the best results).
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Again... Test your tapes first and continue from there. |
Thank you for your input josem84, and again a thank you to lordsmurf for his continued input.
I do have a S-VHS camera with S-Video in decent condition for all my S-VHS tapes I recently bought a Sony DCR-TRV240 Digital8 camera from a colleague, It has S-Video out, and I referenced the manual to find it will play Hi8 and Standard8 tapes. So that's covered. I've played back a couple tapes in the camera and the quality seems to be very good, josem84 as you recommended I may not need the TBC after all if the tapes have minimal issues. I've looked at the prices for the recommended TBCs and $500+ may be more than I want to spend on a 5-10% quality improvement. I should also mention that I live in Canada so by the time a $500 thing gets to my door it will actually be more like $700 or $800 for me. I also have a pile of MiniDV tapes and I still have a DVX-100b from my early days as a filmmaker for that. I also use Premiere for my day job so I can just capture DV with that, thankfully I kept a version of CC17 on the MacMini because Adobe has been striping legacy functionality from newer versions. lordsmurf you asked about computer hardware, my current PC is an AMD Threadripper build so it only has PCI-E, I have a Mac Mini with Firewire 800 and I just ordered an adapter cable for that to DV so I can transfer the MiniDV and Digital8 tapes. I have an older PC build of a Core2Quade and 790i chipset that has a single PCI gen 1 slot. That chipset will run Windows XP no problem and that's the computer I'd put an ATI AIW in if I can find one. There is a wealth of information on here about the AIW cards but it can be a bit overwhelming, what is my best option for a PCI based All in Wonder card? I'm very curious to do a side by side comparison between the Kworld card I have and an All in Wonder. Thank you again lordsmurf and josem84 for taking time out of your day to answer my questions. Tyler |
Hi tylannosaurus
How is your project going? Just like you, I decided to get involved in capturing our family VHS tapes. So, in a way I am following your footsteps and ended up on your thread following my post here. I was also influenced and fooled by "Technology Connections," up to the point where I have this product in my Amazon wish list as I write this. Being a neophyte, I started recently by purchasing: At this point, I did capture 2 VHS tapes on my MacBook using the above listed items but I am hot impressed with the results. Before I proceed furrther I want to make sure I have an optimal setup. It appears the 'Upscaler' is all BS. And it looks like my VHS purchase has been a mistake in terms of delivering optimal quality. :( I will be looking for the recommended S-VHS players with inline TBC. But at this point I could not find any decent ones available on ebay Canada. So I was wondering if you can share your experience and what gear did you end up investing in towards optimal VHS video capture ? Thanks JM |
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- lack of line TBC leaves wiggles and noise in the video - lousy capture card - lack of frame TBC may cause more issues that present both visually and as capturability The JVC 3800 is/was nice for recording, previewing, rewinding, but not actual capturing with quality. That model was my favorite workhorse for recording in the 90s, but it's not overly special now. It has a decently stable transport, so it's a unit I'd pick for a super-budget workflow using the ES10/15 as line. Quote:
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(I have no sympathy here, as USA has to import the best PAL decks from Europe. I've imported a lot of gear over the years. That's just what is required to get the best gear. Trying to "shop local" will rarely land you what you need, even if you live in a large place like NYC or LA.) Quote:
Not just any VCR, TBC, or capture card, but recommended units for both consumer analog formats (like VHS) and with quality. Hence the recommended list for VCRs, TBCs, and capture cards. When it comes to costs: buy it, use it, resell it. There are ways to cut corners when creating a workflow, which is almost always done for budget reasons, but every corner cut can/does affect quality. So it must be planned carefully. Right now, May 2020, the floor for a passably-decent budget workflow (with some finger-crossing required) is about $600. And the best workflows are about $2500, but not easy to built (gear scarcity, which will only drive up costs in the future). But again: buy it, use it, resell it. |
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Hi Lordsmurf,
Thanks a lot for your valuable input. Still learning here ;) If you have any tips/references for the gear I could purchase let me know. I am willing to put on hold my capturing project until I am set up properly. Fingers crossed as to how long that will take me to find what is required. JM |
I'm new here and a wealth of info my brain is melting... I to have a shed full of VHS tapes I want to digitize have tried with Formac digital box but I am getting frame drop outs if that's the term (recording then split second stop then going again but the image looks fine on tv). I have a Panasonic NV FS100 HQ SVHS in mint condition mine from new. So doing a lot of reading befor asking the questions.... been loading on to iMovie and each time it makes a new clip and lose a second of voice over, pain. I don't want to edit to extremes just cut out unwanted items. So looks like I need a TBC and Capture card. Need to read more.
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Using iMovie to capture videos is like using a butter knife to shave.
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Hi everyone,
I wound up here after thinking the exact same thing as @tylannosaurus after watching the video from Technology Connections. Very glad I did more research! I'm currently in a similar situation where I've been put in charge of backing up our family's VHS-C home videos. While I would love to invest in the right hardware for perfect quality, I'm not sure we have the budget to support it. Considering the resources required to digitize VHS in the best possible way, we might need to opt for a more affordable solution (please don't hate me). However, before making that determination, it would be really helpful to see an example of an excellent VHS capture obtained through the recommended hardware and software on this forum versus a method that doesn't involve a TCB, ideal capture card, or S-VHS player. Would anyone know of a resource or be willing to link to / share some examples? I wasn't able to find anything on YouTube or elsewhere, any examples would be greatly appreciated. One more question - I know that the ideal capture resolution for VHS to digital conversion is quite low relative to modern standards. When stretched to fit a modern screen (in the correct aspect ratio of course), do these not look overly pixelated or blurred? Or are they significantly better than the image one might get from plugging a composite cable into a modern HDTV? Apologies if that's been answered already. Many thanks for your help. |
The goal of a good capturing job is to make sure that when you playback the file it should look as close as possible to the original tape if it was played straight from the VCR to TV, in some instances slightly better if corrections are done to the video, As far as aspect ratio, No you are not suppose to stretch the picture, it should be played in its native aspect 4:3 ratio with black bars on the sides, any attempt to get rid of those bars will result in a severely stretched frame (aka fat faces) or missing top and bottom parts of the picture.
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My main question is... how does the upscaler take the place of frame TBC? Certainly, it's not compensating for dropped frames. It's not a DV converter. Does color output as 4:2:2? If someone could explain how the upscaler that he used in that video works to avoid dropped frames I would greatly appreciate it. |
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