I bought a SVHS JVC MV45 from lordsmurf in the marketplace about a year ago, and finally got a old vista PC with a S-Video capture card (HVR-1600) all setup with the
virtualdub and huffyuv and started capturing some clips from a collection approx 75 VHS tapes, mostly in SP, that are between 25-40 years old. I spent the money on the SVHS but have several PCs, several capture cards, etc, that I iterated through till I finally found something I'm convinced is at least workable.
My goal is to
- preserve the VHS video
- Upload and Share them in Google Photos (covert to format suitable for chopping into clips, mask/cut distortion on bottom, any simple, ideally single pass improvements)
My ask of this post is three fold (and let me know if I need to split it up into multiple posts)
- Review attached clips and confirm capture is 'okay -> good'?
- Point me in direction of guide/post to get bottom CC distortion masked/cut and video prepped for upload to google photos (ideally doing this in one pass along with any recommended "enhancements" (hopefully an avisynth crop/enhance/convert "ez mode"
. I have so many tapes that I'm more concerned with getting the capture right the first time and just putting the content shares out quickly, retaining a preserved copy if extensive editing is needed/requested later (but this is unlikely to happen - family is going to love this the way it is I'm sure, and that they didn't have to do it or pay for it).
- Is there a better format than the huge (50gb per 2hr SP tape) format huffyuv avi file for longer term storage?
With the capture, for some of these tapes anyways, I think I'm going to get one shot. So if I need to make any changes, I should make them now. I already had a tape that got distortions at the beginning of the tape pretty bad after a full rewind (I captured a second time due to NR enabled and poor results - see attachments. I'm also concerned about damaging the nice VCR due to their age.)
Attached are two clips. One has the
virtualdub noise reduction on, but I found that this gave a ghosting or motion blur effect that was pretty distracting. Once I turned that off, it seemed a lot better. But, I included both here for any tips. Other than the noise reduction I've configured the
JVC SVHS menu options and
Virtual dub options exactly as they are on the posts here with nothing fancy.
Background info:
I did some trial runs on other PCs (mostly Win10, Win7, Vista, XP laptops and netbooks) with some USB cards... Tried a Hauppauge USB-Live 2 and a generic usb2 but always got tons of dropped frames and audio sync issues in
virtualdub on many of those PCs. They could capture directly in MPEG-2 okay, but I didn't know if this would be ideal for long term storage. The vista desktop w/ PCI MVR-1600 drops about 14 frames when I click capture then is perfectly in sync and no dropped frames after that.
Thanks in advance
