BetaMax workflow with TBC?
 

I have a Sony SL-HF750 Betamax machine and want to incorporate it through my current VHS workflow but had a few questions. *I have a BVDTBC10 and an ATI AIW USB.

I was curious if people use composite for these since most beta machines didn't have S-video connections or if there was another method?
Second, if there are any compatibility issues with beta through these machines.

Thank you

Besides composite you would capture it the same way as VHS.

Yes, just a few points to note.

Firstly a decent TBC with equisite filtering (probably not a promsumer model) can create a rather pleasing quazi-S Video YC to work with, it's not as good as full S-video natraully but it can be nearly indistinguishable if this is a genuine issue.

Betamax transfers also need monitoring due to tracking issues, there ads to my knowledge no auto-tracking Betamax decks, even out ED machines don't have that facility.

I'm not a fan of Betamax nor its alleged benefits over VHS, I'm yet to actually see any great difference between it and VHS/V2000 in quality, Sony made much of quite minor differences, that's the PAL experience anyway.

SuperBetaED looks rather nice how ever.

Beta didn't get a chance to improve like VHS did even their latest decks the ED Beta's look too ancient compared to say JVC VHS's from late 90's, Their VCR's always have quirks and you have to babysit them to play correctly.

That's a fair assessment as I see it.

We have SL-HF950s which were the top of the line, agonal gasp (1988) PAL machines with ED recording and playback. They're nice enough, but I can't see what all the fuss with about with Betamax personally. I find Betamax interchangeability is a bit more of a crapshoot than VHS with some tapes simply refusing to play on some machines and perfectly on others, I've not done thousands of them like other formats though so take that as mere conjecture.

They were both inferior to V2000 in many ways, but V2000 came out 2-3 years later and used a far more costly technique, coupled with notoriously over-engineered and troublesome machines. The battle was for all intents and purposes over by the time V2000 entered the conflict. Philips had the benefit of learning from the Sony/JVC et. al. mistakes. Philips could have taken the whole world in 1976 if it wasn't for a fundamentally flawed judicial ruling that worked in the favour of precisely nobody.

It's quite tricky to draw a line as to where the format war ended, it could be argued it was as early as 1978 or as late as 1988 depending on perspective.

VHS was the rightful winner really, it's the simplest system that delivered more than acceptable results.

Thank you for everyones input, is there a major difference in quality for using composite vs s-video for betamax like for VHS?
And can you safely and effectively change from a composite output to S-video?? Didn't know if the swap would actually work. Seems like the signals being different would cause issues.

Yeah don't try and mix them, you'll end up with composite.

(Very) basically, with S-Video the luminance (Y) signal and the colour (C) signals are kept separate. Due to the cruel quicks of the universe when you mix them (composite) it can all get a bit smudged as they can interfere with one another.

The video signal on the tape is separated, then it was combined for composite output. This was deemed good enough for decades in some cases. The machine lays down separate colour and luminance signals for reasons not worth going into here, but basically, S-Video is more akin to what is on the tape.

YC signals are definitely the way to go, they're a good deal 'cleaner' and less prone to issues such as dot crawl. NTSC especially can suffer from this, but it's hardly unknown with PAL in extreme cases.

The composite (mixed) signal has to be unmixed to capture and it's not unlike unmixing a tin of paint. It's doable, many devices handle it very poorly, but mathematically it's doable. Some quite hardcore mathematics and filtering is required to do it really effectively which is lacking in most capture devices/TBCs, you need to be looking at seriously hardcore gear to really be able to do it effectively in hardware to the full extent. We're required to do a lot of composite captures and they require full-blooded TBCs, not prosumer units for best quality.

That's not to say it's unwatchable, or that it's really inferior but it's noticeable to the untrained eye the differences.

But, with Betamax, without extending this into the theoretical, you're stuck.

Makes perfect sense. So would be tracking down an S-video Beta machine be the best way to achieve the best possible quality digitizing then? Utilizing my pre-existing workflow and maybe adding a es10/es15 passthrough.
Or just running composite from my current machine all the way through the workflow?

This is the crux, S-Video Betamax machines don't exist, they were never made, Betamax's failure predates S-Video as standard output.

SCART only just made it to Betamax, but that's only a PAL market doohickey.

The Sony Super Betamax SL-HF1000 and i believe the 900 both had S-video outputs.
http://www.betamaxcollectors.com/son...sl-hf1000.html

If you're going by the pictures, that's an old Sony editing connector, it's not S-Video.

whoops. My mistake. In my research, someone had led me to those. I know for a fact the SL-HF2100 does have S-video.

Also
EDV-7500/7300 (canada version)
EDV-9500/9300 (canada version)
EDV5000/6000 are Japanese only.

If you are in the US, Canada or Japan there is one or two SuperBeta decks and two ED Beta machines with S-Video (several in Japan), Finding them and in good condition is going to take sometime assuming money is not an object, The ED's usually go for $1200 with unknown condition.

We have gotten a little off track inthis thread and I want to reiterate that I am wondering more about process vs units. Is it worth chasing S-video for Beta or is it better to just run composite all the way through.

@Closecall,

Getting an s-video out Beta deck (ED beta most likely) is probably the best option if you have a large number of Beta tapes to convert and are willing to spend the money and take the risk of finding a good one. This avoids the need to separate the composite back into Y/C before capture. I believe a number of the "Big Buck" guys or "gurus" on this forum have ED decks for this purpose*.

I believe the comb filter in the AIW's is not very good so you want to convert from composite to Y/C ahead of it. If you want to try getting the best from a composite output from your SL-HF750 (working I assume) you'll be looking to put the best comb filter in the workflow in front of your AIW.

Your BVTBC10 should be able to perform this function for you: composite in, Y/C out. It's worth a try at least. The BVTBC10 has 2 forms of luma/chroma separation: true comb filter and a simple notch filter which you can chose between. The fact that the manual specifically discusses and provides these options makes me hopeful that it can do the conversion from composite IN to s-video OUT (why else provide them?). The documentation says the notch filter might be better for lesser quality signals as from "consumer VCR's". Hopefully the actual comb filter would provide the best output, but at least you have options to try.

I also recall Sanlyn (where are you friend?) discussing using a DVD recorder as a composite to s-video (Y/C) converter ahead of his AIW capture cards just to employ it's superior comb filter. I believe he did this when using composite output VCR's that he used for their better SLP tracking.

Hope this is useful,

BW

* In racing circles we had "Big Buck Racers" and the "Big Dogs", categories to which most of us aspired. I'm not sure what we should call the seasoned pros that post here :salute:

Another way to get around this Y/C problem is using a DVD recorder in passthrough, input composite and output Y/Pb/Pr and capture as such, this way you don't have to deal with ancient color formats schemes and their separation problems, You will need a capture card that can capture component.

There's also the Japan only EDV-8000. The EDV-7000 and EDV-9000 were the Japanese versions of the EDV-7500 and EDV-9500.

Edit: I thought the EDV-7XXX and EDV-9XXX where the only ED-Beta machines. It was only within the last 10 years or so, that I discovered on eBay the existence of the other, consumer oriented machines. Makes sense, since Japan was always interested in the highest quality video for the home market.

The only other Betamax with S-Video is the SL-HF2100 as stated in another post. The 15th Anniversary Beta that costs a couple of thousand dollars and IMO, having owned the EDV-7500 as well, the EDV-7500 had a better picture.

All the above are NTSC only. There were no PAL machines with S-Video as Beta died out quicker in Europe than North America and Japan.

Visit mrbetamax.com for NTSC machines and palsite.com for PAL. I don't know if MrBetamax is still in business. Last I read, he hasn't been responding to emails.
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The SL-HF950 wasn't ED-Beta and probably didn't have S-Video unless it was through the Euroconnector (unlikely).

http://www.palsite.com/950spec.html

ED-Beta didn't make it to Europe. All ED-Beta machines were EDV-XXXX. ED-Beta was introduced in 1988. Long after the SL-HF950 which was introduced in 1985.

Edit 2: I also owned the SL-HF900, which was just below the SL-HF2100 in picture quality. I sadly never owned the SL-HF1000 or EDV-9500. However, I recall reviews stating the the second in line, 900 and 7500 had better picture quality than their big brothers/sisters because they were intended to [be] the source to the higher end editing machines.

This TBC has composite.
SHIFT to level 1, the first single dot level.
SRC = source
up/down to change
C = composite
S = s-video

It's a RTFM situation (in a nice way). :book:

Note this is a very specific version of this model of TBC. If you buy any random unit, you're going to buy waste money on a flawed paperweight. Beware!

Some TBCs let you crossver C>S or S>C, but it varies. I don't recall offhand how this model acts. It is often part of my TBC testing (per model, not unit), but most fail. I think green AVT-8710 is the only that does it decent, or at all. Be sure the comb filtering is enabled.

Smurfions? :D

Minimurfs?

Yes the EDV-7500 (EDV-7300 Canadian clone) is the best ED Beta machine, Having owned few, The EDV-9500 is an editing model, if you leave it in processing mode it softens the picture, Ray Glasser the Betaholic owned one and mentioned that he didn't like the picture my guess is he tried it in processing mode. The 7500 doesn't have those extra useless (now) circuit boards so that's why it has a slim design, It does have digital processing for freeze frame and possible signal stabilization since it's built in digital memory though Sony never mentioned the word TBC in their manual.

Well, every day is a school day, I didn't know there was a single machine ever with S-Video, I stand corrected.

Mr Glasser is on my list of people to try and contact for an interview, I do not know if he's still around.

As lingyi mentioned there was none in Europe with S-Video and most were mono machines, Beta wasn't really a hit in Europe, Video 2000 probably did better.

It did 'okay', remember Europe is a host of different markets, it's not a monolith.

In some markets, Betamax did very well, in others it was almost totally ignored. V2000 was definitely the third horse in the race, beyond the Netherlands (home of Philips) and Germany (Grundig influence) V2000 was little more than a footnote. I think it squeezed about 10% of the UK market for a short period as one example.

Philips seemed to initially approach the concept a bit differently, it takes a bit of explanation but Philips saw home-video as far more of a time shift device than a pre-recorded media device and used the 8-Hour recording time (without quality loss) with V2000 as the selling point rather than available media; in the beginning at least.

I don't have the figures with me, but I recall some of the Nordic nations being a far more even Betamax/VHS split than here in Brexitstan. France is its own story and will be covered in my documentary as it's a bit crazy what went on there, it can be (albeit a bit of a sideways, tongue-in-cheek view) contemplated that the format war actually started in France. I have SECAM Betamax decks so it did make some inroads.

Have to defend my beloved, but long gone Betamax. The SL-HF2100 looked like something out of Star Trek. The front panel folded down to show a buttonless touch panel and the remote was also buttonless, though I think there were slightly raised ridges around the "buttons". Still you couldn't operate it without looking at the screen.

Ah, yes you're entirely right. They're SuperBeta Pro which used to the same metal formulation tape, it looks like this quazi-format only existed on two PAL market machines.

I can't find out any information about it, how closely linked to ED it is I've no idea :hmm:

Thank you!

Does anyone have any knowledge on if you go out composite from beta into the TBC composite, then going out S-video into the AIW? Will there be signal issues or any quality loss? Pros or Cons of trying such a method?

It's probably the best way - but the best thing is to try it and make your own assessments.

I don't use those AIW cards, but I understand that the Y-C filtering isn't the best. If you're doing this as a hobby why not experiment though, experimentation is all part of it.

You can make a couple of captures and A/B them to determine what works best for you, I'd imagine it will be the Y-C output into the card though.

That is a very valid point haha. I just always assume someone has to know more than me and can save me the time doing all the experimenting when it's already been done.

Nobody has your tapes, your machines though, nor your eyes.

There are guidelines certainly, but you need to please yourself ultimately, you don't answer to anybody on here.

If not, you'll get an appreciation of 'why' things are recommended and be able to appreciate the received wisdom, and you can understand what effect Y-C/Composite etc has.

Then you can have a little 20 minute project learning how to make a side-by-side video in AVISynth/VirtualDub for your AB testing. There's quite a bit you can get from that little learning exercise.

I greatly appreciate this point of view as it is 100% correct and makes very good sense. However, I do want to be able to produce the best possible quality I can get and that's what I've been digging for since I started reading this forum for VHS work and now am focusing on Beta. So seeing what the absolute BEST possible options are "technically" and then working it down from there to what i can either afford, produce, or like personally.
As for the setup I have now though, This is perfect and will definitely do that!

That's a good way of looking at it, naturally, everybody wants the same quality.

There has to be room for a bit of experimentation though, occasionally it turns up trumps, if you're going to go through this you might as well enjoy it and learn a bit about video signals, digitisation etc. The best way to learn why some things are not recommended is to try them, then you'll appreciate why they don't come recommended. Obviously, don't do anything injurious to a machine or a tape!

...and to pinch a quote from a great marketing guru, and something I've learned (sometimes the hard way) in business.... Sometimes, the opposite of a good idea is a good idea.

There are good guidelines and a wealth of information out there but never get in the arms race of satisfying forumites and those you can't pick out from a crowd. Take the advice and do great things with it, but only you can be the judge of what works best with what you have.

It depends on the gear.

The only question is if the frame TBC takes comp in, and allows svid out. If so, enable the comb filter (should already be on), and you're good to go. Probably. I don't have time to test this with mine right now.

Thats a great quote! I also greatly appreciate the advice and knowledge you've shared with me here.

On a forward note, I did test the theory of going from Composite to the TBC, Out via S-Video into the AIW and it worked pretty well. The video seems a little hue'd green but that's an easy adjustment. Overall not bad at all. Now to test if some of the imperfections I see are on the tape or within the process as there are some lines and small but noticeable imperfections on the video feed.

Check the TBC proc amp. I don't recall if the comp and svid have isolated settings. I rarely capture composite, and usually use my green AVT-8710 when I do. Most TBCs won't even allow this, there's no crossover.

Rory Sutherland originated the quote, I've been a gushing fan of his work for a while, owning four businesses in various sectors I've had to learn what works and what doesn't and I've had a lot of results from counterintuitive strategy. This can often be applied in life too, if not, it hardly matters in the grand scheme of things, just take it as a learning exercise.

You know, energy drinks are deliberately flavoured to taste pretty vile, that taste associated with energy drinks was found to be 'just' palatable. Without the taste, energy drinks don't perform as well in either sales or perception - so yeah, sometimes doing the opposite of received wisdom yields results, sometimes. We can all be easily tricked, whether we appreciate it or not, those who claim to be immune are usually the most easily swayed.

Anyway, wandering a bit off-topic, but good luck with everything.

Thank you very much! Also it makes perfect sense. Its about Risk. Everything great requires risks and leaps. Everyone thought facebook marketing would be a joke until billions of eyes were on it every day.
For some reason I've always loved that weird energy drink style flavor hahaha. Not all of them but some in particular and it makes sense how you put it. Thank you for the fun conversation though. Much appreciated again.

Ahhh...and I thought I knew about Beta! Never heard of SuperBeta Pro. Here's some info about it: https://www.palsite.com/950ovi.html
https://www.palsite.com/tapes.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmkKHR6YRes

Pro-X were regular oxide formulation, though high quality tapes, not metal oxide like the ED-Beta tapes. I tried used a ED-Beta tape in on of my non-ED-Beta machines and got nothing. Another interesting trait of ED-Beta tapes were they were immune to the bulk eraser I had for reel-to-reel tapes, unlike regular Beta and VHS tapes.

BetaSP tapes like the one shown in the video were available in both oxide and metal.

The first of these tapes was the Pro-X tape which worked with the Super Beta Pro mode found on the SL-HF750 and SL-HF950. After this came tapes for the ED-BETA format. Sadly there are very few PAL ED-BETA machines available, in the NTSC market lots of models were produced and some are still available. Although Pro-X tapes were intended for use in Super Betamax format, they were often found by many as a high grade tape for the standard beta. One particularly good use was for PCM audio recordings.

According to Palsite, PAL ED-BETA machines are now only to be found in the middle eastern markets in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Israel. Another fact I didn't know.

I also learned that the SL-HF950 was the PAL version of the SL-HF750. As I recall, the Sl-HF750 was the last mid/high end Betamax. I considered getting one at the time, but as I recall, I somehow, probably from Japanese magazines, knew about the upcoming 15th Anniversary Betamax and waited for that instead.

@Closecall

IMO, I would get a Japanese ED-Beta machine. While not cheap, they're a relative bargain, assuming they're in good working order at <$1000. You'll pay at least twice that for a SL-HF2100. The only other Betamax with S-Video.

There's always the what else could I have done better that would nag at me! This is the main reason I gave up on capturing a long time ago and have learned to be patient as almost everything commercial worth having eventually was/is released on better quality video. I'm very patient. Only recently was a Blu-Ray version of a movie from my favorite Taiwanese actress released. Prior to that, the only copy I had was a VCD from 25+ years ago!

FYI, in my Betaphile years, I'd wait until the top models dropped below $1000 before I got them. This was the main reason I never got a SL-HF1000 or EDV-9500. They never dropped below $1000. <GRIN>

Ray is very much still around. He's posted videos to his YouTube channels in the past week.