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  #1  
11-02-2021, 01:53 PM
SHGMC_2 SHGMC_2 is offline
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Hi. I am an employee of SHGMC.

We are trying to capture Umatic tapes. The most recent Umatic tapes (2000s tapes), we are able to capture with VirtualDub with no issues whatsoever with an older AGP GPU (All-In-Wonder 9600). However, for the older ones, no matter what computer we use; an older (Pentium 4 1GB RAM w/AGP ATI GPU) or newer Win7 machine (Core i7 950, 12GB of DDR3 RAM, GeForce GTX 680)... VDub will drop frames like no tomorrow. Using the VisonTek TV Wonder HD 600 USB Media center, we can record just fine. However, we are unable to capture in LPCM audio despite setting up a MPEG2/48KHZ 16-bit LPCM combo. The result file would always be in MP2 (which creates cutoffs at roughly 16Khz, bad quality).

We would like to record as lossless as possible and only encode at the final step.

We are at a loss here. We are unable to identify what is the issue. Is the capture card? Is it the playback machines? The timecode sync machine? Our cable setup? We would prefer using the Windows 7 machine and the dongle. (Because we will be able to store a lot of data on GPT HDD)

So, the *recent* setup is...

Sony Umatic Videocassette Player VP-7020 or Sony Umatic Videocassette Recorder V0-5850

dataVideo TBC Time Base Corrector TBC-3000

VisionTek TV Wonder HD 600 USB

USB 2 port of Gigabyte X58A-UD3R, on Windows 7 x64 SP1 (up-to-date)

VDub lossless YUY2 PCM 640x480

USB 3 1TB HDD connected through USB 3 port of Gigabyte motherboard. System as a SATA3 MLC SSD of 90GB.

We'd love to test and use Huffyuv. However, we cannot edit them in Adobe Premiere Pro because it does not recognize the codec but recognizes YUY2.

I know Umatic sucks. But, we're stuck trying to digitalize them... It's our job.

Thank you for our help. I will most likely see the replies tomorrow.
Cheers.

Last edited by SHGMC_2; 11-02-2021 at 01:56 PM. Reason: added "Umatic" tapes to title
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  #2  
11-06-2021, 02:44 PM
keaton keaton is offline
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Hello, and welcome! Thanks for being a Premium Member!

I recently acquired a Sony VO-9600 to capture a small number of U-matic tapes. No prior experience with U-matic, but years with VHS thanks to this forum. I'll tell you what I had success with and hope it might help.

If you haven't already, please take time to read the Virtualdub Settings Guide http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...-settings.html. I use the standard Virtualdub 1.9.11 package provided on this forum (http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...lters-pre.html) with a Windows XP machine and an ATI AIW Capture Card recommended on the forum.

The capture timing options I use are the same as what's shown in Post #6 of that virtualdub capture guide. These are the same settings I've been using with my VHS setup for years, and it's worked for me. Granted, the TBC is doing most of the work keeping video and audio in sync. Most recommend capturing to 720 x 480, then using tools to convert down to 640 x 480, either with aspect ratio flag settings such as for MPEG-2 for DVD or physically resizing the video in a tool like Avisynth with something like Spline36Resize from 720 to 640 for MPEG-4 (although H264 does also support aspect ratio flags).

I'd recommend trying to make things work with your AIW card if you are trying to get the best video quality. Althought, the 600 USB should be using the same great video capture chipset, so that should yield similar quality. One caveat I've found with USB is that you don't have Levels control in Virtualdub so if you have video going below or above the recommend 16 to 235 range in the Preview Histogram you'll have to have something else in your video chain to adjust brightness or contrast to keep things in legal range.

I had tapes from circa 1984. One example was a 3M Scotch brand tape that I discovered suffered from a low signal strength. I had heard from other sources that older Scotch brand tape can have a gradual self erasing characteristic which reduces the signal strength on the tape. I suppose other tapes of a certain age could also have signal issues. One of the reasons I sensed I had low signal was that even when passing the video through my Data Video TBC, the video frames were still "rolling" like you might see on old analog TV sets when the video hold wasn't working. This "rolling" told me that the frame sync was not being kept even with this TBC. At first I had tried the tricks such as moving the Skew control on the Player to the left to try and get a stronger tape tension, hoping it might help improve the signal strength a bit. In my case, that didn't change my end results. I also tried adjusting tracking, but it did not resolve the issue of a weak frame sync on the video.

So, I also have a Panasonic DMR-ES10 DVD recorder that I use for some occasions as a video pass thru to keep a steady video signal before going to my capture card. The similar ES15 model is also mentioned quite a lot, and though I have no experience with it, it is considered to have similar capabilities as the ES10. In my case, I removed the Data Video TBC from the video path, and connected the Video out of the U-matic player to the ES10 Video Input 1, and the S-Video output of the ES10 to the input of my capture device. The rolling frames were no longer present. So, in my case, this pass thru re-established a strong frame sync that I could capture with.

Another thing to check for a PC that is having trouble "keeping up" and dropping frames would be to ensure the PC is not doing anything else but video capture. Use the Task Manager to see that the CPU load is low and check that no other tasks are consuming any real CPU time. My machine is not connected to any network (because you don't want the internet to interrupt whatever your PC needs to do during capture), and there are not any other background tasks running that could be competing for CPU time. Video capture is a real time task, and it cannot wait if some other task decides it needs to run. If such a thing does happen, the capture could drop frames as it tries to recover.

Another thing I would mention, but it seems you already have this covered, is to be sure whatever hard drive you are capturing to is not the same hard drive as your Windows hard drive. Even if there is nothing else running on your computer, I and many others report that you have much better luck with video capture if you have a separate data hard drive that Virtualdub is capturing the video/audio to. Hard drive speed shouldn't be an issue, as we are capturing standard definition video. Although it may help to have a rather empty and not too fragmented hard drive.

Anyway, since you had success capturing newer tapes without drops, it seems the issue is likely not hard drive configuration or PC resources. It seems most likely to do with Virtualdub settings and/or not getting a solid steady frame synced signal from the tapes. The aforementioned Panasonic DVD Pass Thrus ES10 or ES15 are still a pretty cheap piece of the puzzle, and perhaps it could help you. I was surprised myself that the ES10 gave me better frame sync for a low RF signal U-matic tape when compared to a Data Video TBC. I suppose neither was designed with U-matic in mind. I was thankful I didn't have to try going the U-matic based TBCs route, and that this pass thru saved the day! The broadcast style TBCs that were intended to be used on U-matic equipment are probably a much harder piece of gear to find, and probably even harder to find in good working order. But that may be the only other thing that could remedy old tapes that are not playing well.

Maybe this also causes the same issue for you as HuffYUV, but Lagarith is another lossless format that has YUY2 capability. Plenty about that on this forum. I've switched to capturing in that format, and have been successful with it. I have no experience with Adobe, and many on this forum stick with Virtualdub and Avisynth for video editing and restoration. My only other thought is that if you converted the Lossless AVI to RGB uncompressed video (2 or 3 times larger than HuffYUV or Lagarith I think), perhaps Adobe can process that? A huge hard drive requirement, of course, but if you are constrained to that tool, you may have to spend more time converting between various lossless formats. I have no experience there.

Best of luck to you! And, yes, U-matic sucks! Although, I am impressed at how much of a quality boost there is from another 20 to 30 lines of resolution compared to VHS. Between the tape baking and the frequent head cleaning due to such dirty tapes and no auto tracking, it's a new set of challenges to contend with compared to the more modern tape formats.
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  #3  
11-08-2021, 12:16 PM
BW37 BW37 is offline
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I think Keaton is pointing in the most logical direction: since the captures work fine with "good tapes" but not "bad" ones, the problem is upstream of the PC and it's subsystems. Still, I would try capturing to a 2nd internal, SATA drive rather than the USB 3 drive just to see if that is causing some issues. It looks like that motherboard is a very early USB 3 board with a separate NEC chip providing USB 3 support. Maybe it's not quite up to the job.

You haven't give the entire specs for your XP system, but a P4 with 1GB ram is at the lower end of what would be recommended for capture.

BW
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  #4  
11-08-2021, 02:35 PM
RobustReviews RobustReviews is offline
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You'll need a 'proper' TBC to deal with UMatic, not a prosumer unit.

It's a wiggly-wobbly mess the direct output from most UMatic machines (that's why they were sold with a rack of equipment to support them), they were always crossfired with a frame-store, TBC and DOC, broadcast tapes can be an absolute pain in the bottom, domestic machines were designed to run without a rack of equipment so usually have a more stable output.

The other thing to consider is to check the skew settings etc, and to check you're not mixing UMatic systems as there were a couple of semi-compatible versions of it. I'm PAL minded so I won't go in to the details as it could well be different in NTSC land.

I would wager the old tapes were made on early machines which really, really need a lot of equipment to support them, remember this is early 1970s tech. The recorder/player was only part of a large signal chain.

If you're in the UK I do have a decent UMatic frame store & DOC sitting here you're welcome to borrow as I have a few of them and they're not especially useful these days.
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  #5  
11-09-2021, 08:59 AM
SHGMC_2 SHGMC_2 is offline
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First, thank you to those who replied.

Quote:
Originally Posted by keaton View Post
Anyway, since you had success capturing newer tapes without drops, it seems the issue is likely not hard drive configuration or PC resources. It seems most likely to do with Virtualdub settings and/or not getting a solid steady frame synced signal from the tapes.
Looking at the solution we found yesterday and what you said there, it totally makes sense.

Also, in the meant time we made this thread, my boss told me that we would have to cut the lossless video from the process because we have a *lot* of Umatic to transfer and we needed a great way to transfer.

So, no matter what we did, VirtualDub was having none of it. Then, my boss wanted the MPEG2/MP2 route (eurk) because he couldn't afford to wait more. However, over the last weekend, I found a worthy solution that we had great success with so far: OBS Studio.

Yep, the streaming (but also recording) software works amazingly well to capture anything that come from the capture card. We went for a H264 nvenc and PCM16_le in a MOV container; 12000kbps @ 640x480. Too much bitrate I know, but the goal was to keep as much quality as possible while still compressing. So, we could just do hundreds of tapes without running out of space. It's also much less trouble to transfer.

In fact, he was so happy with the setup that he wants to get more Win7 x64 machines to also capture VHS. I'm almost tempted to tell him to go with LordSmurf approved Win10 cards and get somewhat recent PCs for them.

Yes, OBS is not a LordSmurf approved recording software but we were sick and tired of that issue; especially when we followed all tutorials and still had drop frames a-plenty.

Cheers.

EDIT
@RobustReviews We are in Canada, Quebec (province).

Last edited by SHGMC_2; 11-09-2021 at 09:01 AM. Reason: specific answer to RobustReviws.
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  #6  
11-09-2021, 09:37 AM
RobustReviews RobustReviews is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by SHGMC_2 View Post
First, thank you to those who replied.

Yes, OBS is not a LordSmurf approved recording software but we were sick and tired of that issue; especially when we followed all tutorials and still had drop frames a-plenty.

Cheers.

EDIT
@RobustReviews We are in Canada, Quebec (province).
Somtimes you've just got to do what you've got to do - if you've found a solution that allows you to get the job done at the moment, then why not. You're not here to validate any individual, experiment and work out what works best with what you've got! Take advice and use it to build what you need, there's no hard and fast rules when you're just having internet conversations.

Glad you've had success, OBS has a terrible reputation on here as 'only screen capture software' [no, RTFM or glace over the source-code] it is an ingest program I can see having a larger part to play in this as time moves forward.

I don't personally use it (and I'm not saying it's the BEST solution or even a good one, but it is one) like it or no, it's compatible with modern hardware, is 64-bit native and can offer high-quality capture. In a few years, it might be the only general use capture software left.

UMatic is fun to play with (we offer High/Low and SP) but it's a nasty old system to work with generally which is why transferring it is usually quite pricy. Anybody who claims 'professional videotape has a more stable signal' obviously has never used UMatic, C or Betacam!

Regards,
RR
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  #7  
11-10-2021, 04:57 AM
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lordsmurf lordsmurf is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by SHGMC_2 View Post
We are trying to capture Umatic tapes.
Already ... yikes! That format is like consumer analog formats, like VHS. And yet ... not.

Quote:
VDub will drop frames like no tomorrow.
Framesync TBC in use? And if so, which one?

Quote:
despite setting up a MPEG2/48KHZ 16-bit LPCM combo.
Wait ... what? VirtualDub doesn't do MPEG-2.
(ATI CMC does, but it lacks dropped frames counter, so not really overly suggested for MPEG capture of anything important. CMC does MPEG video + MPEG audio.)

Quote:
USB 3 1TB HDD connected through USB 3 port of Gigabyte motherboard. System as a SATA3 MLC SSD of 90GB.
Hmm... USB, of any kind, routes through CPU. It's not sustained, but burst. What happens when you capture to motherboard-connected drives, which routes directly over PCI lanes, not through CPU (but can be shared with CPU, for technical nitpickers).

Quote:
We'd love to test and use Huffyuv. However, we cannot edit them in Adobe Premiere Pro because it does not recognize the codec but recognizes YUY2.
Ew, this is dropped frames root cause for sure. Uncompressed YUY2 + USB = mess. Premiere Pro absolutely recognizes Huffyuv, if installed correctly. But as a test, also try with Lagarith, which is more native to modern x64, thus automatic for Premiere Pro installs on x64 OS.

Quote:
I know Umatic sucks. But, we're stuck trying to digitalize them... It's our job.
Maybe not "sucks" just more issues. The quality can actually be more decent than a VHS tape.

Quote:
Originally Posted by SHGMC_2 View Post
we had great success with so far: OBS Studio.
You're not capturing, you're screen recording. OBS is not an analog capture tool, and has downsides. For example, audio is re-recorded, not really direct captured. That has consequences.

Quote:
Yes, OBS is not a LordSmurf approved recording software but we were sick and tired of that issue; especially when we followed all tutorials and still had drop frames a-plenty.
This really shows that the dropped frames was 100% a data throughput issue. Combo of USB and YUY2. That's what SATA 16tb Seagate Exos drives are for, and lossless.

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  #8  
11-10-2021, 05:37 AM
RobustReviews RobustReviews is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lordsmurf View Post
Maybe not "sucks" just more issues. The quality can actually be more decent than a VHS tape.

PAL tapes are great, the quality is fantastic (UMatic lasted longer I think in PAL regions, I don't think there was such a rush to switch to vanilla Betacam here) - we still see UMatics recorded well into the 1990s from clients.

It 'looks like' N1700 [PAL markets only] in my opinion, still very analogue but better than Betamax/VHS/V2000 and not as good as Betacam SP. I've never been convinced by audio on UMatic, but ultimately it's a prehistoric format that was long in the tooth when it went out of fashion here. MII found some (limited) favour over here too which compounds that but I'm wandering off-topic.

It's a swine to capture though, along with most of the professional tapes, professional doesn't always mean an easier capture. A metal SDI conversion suits them best in my experience but that's not for everybody.
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11-10-2021, 09:05 AM
SHGMC_2 SHGMC_2 is offline
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Hello Lordsmurf. I have some time to kill, so let me clear up some things! I'll be goin in order of your quotes.

(Quote 1 and 2, nothing to say)

3. I wasn't talking about VirtuaDub either. We were talking about ATI MediaCenter and the like.
EDIT: Yeah, like those. No matter the setting we chose with them, it didn't matter.

4. In this case, yeah. It might be routed through CPU because of the age of the platform. However, we did try with an ATI All-In-Wonder 9600 on an XP machine that had SATA ports and a 2TB HDD connected to it for capture and we still had drop-frames a plenty with VirtualDub.

5. That's good to know. However, because of time constraints, that'd be for another day.

6. Definitely more issues. The players we have, are trouble in themselves. And, yes, I agree that Umatic look much better than VHS!

7. Well, it saves us trouble and I checked the audio's spectrals that I extracted from the .mov files and they were full lossless. So, that tells me that the audio passthrough the capture card before being recorded by OBS. And the quality is as good as one of the software you suggest. It might not be "an analog capture" per se, but it works for us.

8. Unfortunately, I've ruled out that it's not. See Point 4. And, like I said, it was connected through USB 3 which provides enough data throughput for lossless AVI @ 640x480. And, we could also capture newer Umatic tapes through the All-In-Wonder card through SATA2 (3gbps) on a 2TB HDD.

I think our issue is probably either of the following: VDub settings or signals issue with the old tapes.

Quote:
It's a swine to capture though,
Yep... truth.

Last edited by SHGMC_2; 11-10-2021 at 09:33 AM. Reason: skipped a quote.
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11-10-2021, 09:31 AM
RobustReviews RobustReviews is offline
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Low signal is common with aged UMatic tapes, dealing with this is probably beyond the realm of a quick internet discussion but there are a few options, but they all involve an amplifier.

The tapes were really designed to run with a DOC (Drop Out Compensator) too, magnetic drop out isn't handled at all by some machines (a different machine dealt with drop-out) which could be another issue you're encountering. A lot of machines do deal with drop-out, but a lot don't.

If your machine has a terminal on the rear marked 'DOC' it might be an indicator it's not handling dropout at all.

If you're got high-band/low-band UMatic mixed up, on PAL at least you'll get a strong monochrome signal but no colour.
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  #11  
11-11-2021, 07:41 AM
SHGMC_2 SHGMC_2 is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by RobustReviews View Post
Low signal is common with aged UMatic tapes, dealing with this is probably beyond the realm of a quick internet discussion but there are a few options, but they all involve an amplifier.

The tapes were really designed to run with a DOC (Drop Out Compensator) too, magnetic drop out isn't handled at all by some machines (a different machine dealt with drop-out) which could be another issue you're encountering. A lot of machines do deal with drop-out, but a lot don't.

If your machine has a terminal on the rear marked 'DOC' it might be an indicator it's not handling dropout at all.

If you're got high-band/low-band UMatic mixed up, on PAL at least you'll get a strong monochrome signal but no colour.
That's real good info! Thanks! I'll forward this to the boss!
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