Vhs capture --- kona aja lhi ... Not impressed!!

[johnnysh]

Hello

any advice would be very much appreciated


OK, so I have a stack load of video tapes some over 3O years old and would like to archive and digitally store them on my PC at the VERY VERY BEST QUALITY !!!

and I mean very best quality

I am a strange freak when it come to quality, very seldom happy with anything and find fault in everything, so with the poor quality of 80s video, I have a real up hill struggle with this project


I have a Professional Video Play back Machine a SONY SVO-5800P which to be honest does a great job, or as best as one can expect from crap quality VHS, I also have connected to that sony machine a pro JVC colour monitor TM-A101G, again does a great job

So the above analogue kit I am ok with and reasonably happy with,

It's the Digital PC Capturing stuff I'm not happy with,

I started with a Black Magic Intensity USB 3 Shuttle capture device, absolute garbage, poor quality drivers, and semi ok results

so then invested in a kona LHI capture card although a whole lot better that the Black Magic device, still the quality ain't great compared to watching it on the JVC monitor,



and help and advice will be very much appreciated

Regards

[latreche34]

If quality matters you would need a S-VHS VCR with S-Video output to capture the native Y/C signal recorded on tape and for even best results the VCR should be equipped with a line TBC to rearrange scan lines and stack them evenly. The Aja card is probably fine, your video monitor shows better picture because it stabilize the picture while the capture card relies on some sort of TBC functionality from either the VCR itself or an external frame TBC so the capture card is not worsening the quality unless you have wrong settings in the capture software.

[hodgey]

The SVO-5800P is a SVHS VCR with TBC. Most analog video is interlaced,it will look more smooth when viewing directly an analog monitor. What you get when view the capture input will be 25 (PAL/SECAM) or 29.97(NTSC) full frames (2 fields) per second weaved together and usually has to be further processed, while the CRT will display each field on it's own. That said there could be more issues.

[Eric-Jan]

@johnysh I bet you did not try the SONY SVO-5800P with the component video output board add in.... would be the perfect combination with the Intensity Shuttle, because of the stable video signal you get with component video output.
....and yes, VHS will look beatiful on the CRT you have, like already said, it all depends how you want to watch, on a big progressive HDMi monitor or a small interlaced CRT monitor (RGB?)
and the Sony SVO-5800 being a PAL model, using it with poor resolution NTSC tapes... is also not much of use, i hope you have PAL VHS tapes to capture.... you did not mention this.
Using the Intensity Shuttle only for it's composite or s-video inputs.... any other capture device will do also.