Mac capture card for Video8 tapes?

[PepsiMan]

Hello world!

I'm new to the digitization of analog tapes and, like many, I'd like to digitize my family's Video8 tapes (as well as a few DV and Digital8 tapes of my own going forward).

What I have:
- Sony Digital8 camera with S-video output
- Macbook running newest OS
- Video8 tapes
- Patience and ~$200 for the rest of this project

I've been given loads of advice on which capture card to not get (I just used an Elgato card and was not happy with the results), but I have not had anyone point me to which card I should get.

Is there any way to do this "right" with a mac? It seems that everyone is running Windows 7 (at the newest).

How would you spend $200 to get the video off the tapes and onto my mac?

Any input is appreciated!

- Cole

[aramkolt]

With that budget, I'd probably follow this process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk-n7IlrXI4

The issue will be finding a capture card that works with current Mac OS and feeds it interlaced video. The ADVC-110 does for sure with a firewire to thunderbolt adapter, but that has mixed reviews here in terms of whether it produces visually significant artifacts or not. I have heard a lot of descriptions of image issues with it, but haven't seen video samples showing it. With your budget ease of use, this may be a good option. They can be had for around $100 these days, but you'll need a firewire and firewire to thunderbolt adapter.

Oddly, I see that the price of firewire to thunderbolt adapters has skyrocketed for some reason - I swear they used to be something like $30, but now they seem to be more like $75-$100. You'd then also need a Thunderbolt 2 to USB C adapter if your computer doesn't have a Thuderbolt 2 port (which looks like DisplayPort) and that'd add another $25 or so.

If you think the ADVC-110 looks "good enough" in this comparison video, I'd have confidence in using it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h50Rd7948cs

You could use the intensity shuttle shown in that comparison video, but you very likely will need a frame TBC as it is not as timebase error tolerant as the ADVC-110 is and is.

As stated in that video - it's not for archival quality masters - mainly because they aren't saving in interlaced and aren't using a frame TBC.

If you are getting "tearing" or horizontal image stabilization/jitter or "flagging" issues at the top of the image, add a DMR-ES10 or ES15 as an S-Video passthrough. These I think can be had for $50-$75 shipped last I checked.

If you still have significant image stabilization issues, you'll need to increase your budget and add a frame TBC.

Other thing you could do is just get a 5 year old PC on Facebook marketplace locally for $50-100 and use a known decent modern USB capture cards that work with modern Windows such as the GV-USB2 and then transfer the video over to your Mac later for editing. That's honestly probably the simplest.

Another question is what sort of file sizes you are willing to work with - lossless or archival quality captures will take up something 30-40GB per hour if you do it by recommended methods here and basically always requires a PC - which you could likely do with a $50-$100 used PC found locally on Facebook marketplace and then do editing later with the Mac.

[lordsmurf]

I don't want to see posts answered with links to random Youtube videos. Don't do that. Especially because most of those are misleading, not accurate, just random people with random ideas, almost all of which will lead you astray. That's not how/why people come to this site, which is to get quality advice. Not the "popular"/cheap or even wrong (based on fallacy) opinions.

This person already tried a crappy Elgato card, and the ADVC boxes (which are literally 1990s technology) are not much better. None of that is surprising.

I'll circle back to this question in a bit, busy now, and add some advice for the OP.

[aramkolt]

Fair enough, though I think we'd all like to see some capture comparisons that give some visuals as to how the recommended devices outperform more commonly available/modern ones and to what degree.

I'll eventually make my own video comparing the different devices I've acquired, but that'll also be a YouTube video haha.

I would also post dropbox links to raw captures as well if that's the qualm with YouTube specifically since I know there is some compression that occurs there.

Right now my struggle is in designing the actual tests to run since I don't know what specific tests will best display the strengths and weaknesses of different capture chains other than looking at test patterns and VHS recordings of test patterns for consistency. Using pattern generators more or less would focus on capture quality/reproduction in the absence of timebase errors.

TBC comparisons would probably be a separate video with VHS recordings of digitally generated patterns and possibly a variety of old jittery tapes.

I will say most don't come to this site for Mac compatibility either since none of the recommended capture cards support Mac other than possibly certain ATI600 clones using Videoglide - though I have verified that the drivers for that do not work with M1 and newer Macs.

[lordsmurf]

The possible path of M-chip Mac may lie in a certain Matrox setup, but it won't be $200. I've not had time to acquire all parts needed, nor run those tests.

[bank_saylor]

Thanks, I appreciate LS commitment to excellence. I to would like to convert HI-8 video and SVHS on a M series mac for archiving. I'm a bit dangerous as in a former life set up Betacam-SP video production systems, thus while knowing about TBC and Black Burst act, I know very little about converting the interlaced video to a digital format without lots of problems I've read on this form. My initial goal is just to get the video off the tape. I do have some access to both commercial SVHS decks and to a couple TBCs.

[BmacSWA]

I'm 95% a Mac guy. It just works, right? And what it does it does well. However in this same situation no matter how bad I wanted a Mac solution, I reverted to the PC. the software is pretty much free, and the hardware required can be as cheap or expensive as you desire, but on a PC. You can time warp to the days of Bill Clinton like LS and setup an XP box or experiment with newer hardware and OSs to get the results you like. There is an abundance of info on this forum, and other online sources YT too. You'll bet able to filter out the junk info and soak up the rest.

[aramkolt]

I still haven't done my head-to-head testing, but I imagine that the one of the better Mac-oriented solutions would be:

VCR with line TBC -> Frame TBC with SDI or Component out -> AJA KiPro recording to ProRes 422 in NTSC 480i.

That would produce a visually lossless result depending on the flavor of 422 chosen (Regular Vs HQ) and could even have a bitrate higher than the usual AVI capture path.

Interestingly, that chain doesn't actually require the Mac at all, but ProRes is more of a Mac-friendly format that you could then edit in a linear editor on a Mac without any format conversion required first.

Really all you are missing on Mac is QTGMC deinterlacing, though that is theoretically possible with the Mac Hybrid App if it functioned as intended.

If you want the fewest steps and don't need a lossless/archival capture, you could put a hardware deinterlacer before the KiPro such as the Snell and Wilcox Ph.C (uses motion quantization and works at least partially similarly to QTGMC), Teranex 2D/3D/AV (uses a proprietary deinterlacing algorithm and was used in broadcast environments extremely commonly during the SD to HD transition), or use a line doubler such as the Retrotink 2x (which doesn't deinterlace per se, it just turns each field into a line doubled frame which doubles the frame rate). The Retrotink is designed for stable signals coming off of 240p/480i game consoles, but if your TBC is good enough, it *should* be able to handle stabilized analog signals as well. The AJA KiPro can be set to upscale 480i to 480p, 720p, or 1080p on its own, but I'm not sure how good it is at actually doing it compared to QTGMC or the others listed above.

As an alternative, the BMD Intensity Shuttle is pretty well supported on Mac, but is known to require a good frame TBC which everyone here recommends using anyway, so I don't think it really loses points there if otherwise using a recommended capture chain. You still would need to deinterlace afterwords though at some point.

Any of those chains are way more than $200 though haha.

I have pretty much all the items listed above, and I will eventually post a comparison with raw captures between all of those versus the lossless AVI capture and QTGMC deinterlace. Would be kind of fun to leave the samples unlabeled (to avoid bias) and have people first decide which looks the best to them, then reveal which samples are which chain a bit later.

[Gary34]

If all that YouTube advice is working out soo well for you then why are you here on the forum?

[aramkolt]

I didn't say YouTube suggestions were any better, but it can be good for gathering ideas of what may work well that has not been widely tried by other members here. This forum is often an echo chamber of the same things being repeated without those members personally having tried alternatives, or if they have, it is compared to, at most, two other devices, often with none of them being the "recommended" devices.

As an example, I've never seen anyone suggest using Snell and Wilcox's Ph.C on VHS via YouTube or otherwise. Doesn't mean it isn't worth trying. There are a couple of professional services that do utilize Teranex 2D/3D's - for deinterlace but there really aren't good comparisons on how well it does against anything else.

I think what we're all after is best quality transfers for the budget, OS, and availability of hardware we can get, so I don't know why we'd want to shun trying new things, especially if samples of those captures comparing can be provided, even if they are first demoed on YouTube.

[mbassiouny]

Why are you even looking for a caputre card?

200$? half of it will be quickly gone on adapters welcome to mac world.

Quote:

(as well as a few DV and Digital8 tapes of my own going forward).

These are not analog, these are already digital. So you need to transfer/copy them directly (not capture) via the firewire port of the suitable camcorders ( you didn't mention having a MiniDV camera, but you need one for your minidv tapes).

For that you need firewire cable from camera plugged into
- Firewire to thunderbolt 2 adapter by Apple (no link, discontinued)
- Then plug the TB2 end into a TB2 to TB3 adapter https://www.apple.com/shop/product/M...bolt-2-adapter

This guy is selling both together
https://www.ebay.com/itm/335201757327

Once you get your adapters, now you have to prepare to suffer a bit, hit your computer with a hammer, etc, until you find a good software to capture the DV stream on your MacBook as most of them suck. Try DV rescue, ffmpeg, or Imovie (but don't re-encode while exporting, instead copy the .dv file from the temp project folder)

Now this solves your problem for D8 and miniDV.

Your D8 camcorder is backward compatible, right? it can play hi8/video8?

As for the analog tapes (video8), Yes, these are analog, so it is probably better if you capture them using a capture card with the s-video out of the camcorder (assuming your camcorder outputs analog directly without DV conversion in the process). But, Being on mac, with 100$ left in your budget, there is no capture card I can think of that is worth it. So you might as well just capture the video8 tapes using the firewire port of the camera as well.

The quality will take a hit, but should be better than nothing at all. If you are not satisfied with the quality you may postpose or redo the video8 tapes later with a better budget. Or do most of them in dv format with the tools you have and send the most important tapes (if any) to a transfer service, etc.

Now another way to spend your money is:
- Buy a ThinkPad t410 or t420, or w530 (can be found for 50$) and install windows 7.
- Most of them have native firewire, or you can add a firewire port via express card (20$)
Now you can transfer the miniDV + d8.
Capture the Video8 over svideo with a good capture card for windows 7. with the remaining budget you can try to squeeze and fit an ES10 + a capture card (like io-data gv USB 2 for 60$) or a pinnacle from LS or an ATI 600 from ebay (has to be complete with cables)

[end of useful answer]

Quote:

With that budget, I'd probably follow this process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk-n7IlrXI4

nothing really useful in that video io data won't work on mac.
usb3hdcap will probably be over budget for him. specially after he buys the adapters for firewire.
Dazzle is mediocre and I met a lot of people recently who didn't like it and skeptical of the "pinnacle usb-510" when I mention it because in their heads it will be as bad as the dazzle dvc-100.

Even the BM intensity shuttle will be expensive for his budget (ignoring the fact it is not even recommended).

Quote:

If you think the ADVC-110 looks "good enough" in this comparison video, I'd have confidence in using it:

Why rebuy the wheel if he has one? If he is willing to accept DV format he already has a DV convertor in his camcorder. No need to buy an ADVC

Quote:

Other thing you could do is just get a 5 year old PC on Facebook marketplace locally for $50-100 and use a known decent modern USB capture cards that work with modern Windows such as the GV-USB2 and then transfer the video over to your Mac later for editing. That's honestly probably the simplest.

Yes, this makes perfect sense,good suggestion.

[Gary34]

Is the goal of your testing just to find something cheaper? It doesn’t seem like you are testing because you actually care about the accuracy of the information you are giving out to new people because you are fine with recommending random YouTube videos.

[aramkolt]

Correct, the GV-USB2 will not work on a Mac (unless it's running boot camp running Windows, and it can't be an M1 Mac for that) - I meant to suggest it as part of a readily available $50-$100 used Windows PC purchased off of Facebook, particularly useful if budget is really $200 total.

Also agree that if the Digital8 camera in question outputs DV ok, then no need for the ADVC110, just need those Firewire to thunderbolt adapters. As long as OP has the appropriate cabling to hook it up to his Mac, would be worth a try to see what those results are like and they can determine if they are satisfactory to them.

As far as Mac compatible capture cards, Firewire DV sources or Intensity Shuttle should both work, though the intensity shuttle is known not do well with non-frame TBC'd analog video, so that would probably not work here on that budget. There are several HDMI/SDI capture cards that work well with Mac from BMD and others, but then you do need to get the video into SDI or HDMI first. That can be done by various frame syncs or TBCs, or blackmagic also makes an analog to SDI converter that accepts component, composite, S-Video and will also embed analog audio. That may also require a frame TBC to be usable, haven't done any testing on that yet.

The idea is I'll post the raw captures (via dropbox) of 10+ different chains inducing some of the recommended ones (even some Mac-friendly) so that strengths/weaknesses of each can be visualized using the same source video and/or pattern generators. Use of pattern generators or DVD source should remove timebase errors from the equation, but I'll also do some tests with patterns recorded onto VHS and some "difficult" VHS tapes with various TBCs in use as well.

I personally want to see (and have other see) the range of quality that can be expected with different chains. Should give more confidence when people have certain devices already and wonder if it's worth upgrading to something else.

The comparison will be made into a YouTube video and I'll make a post about it here as well once it's done. Still waiting on some hardware to arrive for the testing at this point.

It will be very interesting to see if the recommended chains are significantly visually different than some of the others in my testing. If the recommended chain tests are clearly better, then yeah, all this effort would have been just reinventing the wheel, but it'll give better evidence as to what specifically makes those chains better and by how much.

[Gary34]

The Intensity Shuttle isn’t compatible with VDub. Maybe the te ion on the marketplace is compatible. Anyways it puzzles me that the digitalfaq method which uses gear that was made for this purpose at a time when there was a focus on this task and has been tested extensively through the years gets a high level of scrutiny and requires your testing and all of that but gear that was meant for gaming and capture cards that the manufacturers have said aren’t good for VHS like the Intensity Shuttle are okay to blindly recommend to new people.

[lordsmurf]

Quote:

Originally Posted by bank_saylor

I to would like to convert HI-8 video and SVHS on a M series mac for archiving.

This is a unicorn flying in space, in terms of a capture card. You can always duct tape a paper towel roll to a horse's head, but you're not going to find a way to launch him to the moon. Mac capture was always difficult, but the new M1/2/3 chips are exponentially more difficult. You'll waste time and money, usually for the reward of crappy video conversions. A 2020s computer is about as useful as a 1980s computer, when it comes to video capture.

Quote:

I know very little about converting the interlaced video to a digital format without lots of problems I've read on this form. My initial goal is just to get the video off the tape. I do have some access to both commercial SVHS decks and to a couple TBCs.

The goal should be to extract what exists on the tape, no more (not HD/4K), no less (not deinterlaced). That means interlaced SD 720x480/576 29.97i.

Now, all that said, circling back to that first post...

Quote:

I'm new to the digitization of analog tapes and, like many, I'd like to digitize my family's Video8 tapes (as well as a few DV and Digital8 tapes of my own going forward).
What I have:
- Sony Digital8 camera with S-video output
- Macbook running newest OS
- Video8 tapes
- Patience and ~$200 for the rest of this project
I've been given loads of advice on which capture card to not get (I just used an Elgato card and was not happy with the results), but I have not had anyone point me to which card I should get.
Is there any way to do this "right" with a mac? It seems that everyone is running Windows 7 (at the newest).
How would you spend $200 to get the video off the tapes and onto my mac?

The Digital8 is DV, and just needs to be transferred from the camera.

For any analog Hi8/Video8...

- for $200 (low budget)
- on a Mac (not great)
- and already owning a D8 camcorder (assuming it plays analog Hi8/Video8, yes?)

... then just use the Digital8 camera as the analog converter, connected via Firewire (adapted through Thunerbolt, etc), and live with the reduced quality. It'll have added block noise, color quality loss, color saturation loss, and color tint shift (example: grandma has a sunborn in winter), but it's video, and it's cheap. It's not destroyed Elgato type quality, which gives a deinterlaced mushy compressed H.264 mess. But not best.

Quote:

Originally Posted by BmacSWA

I'm 95% a Mac guy. It just works, right? And what it does it does well.

And what it doesn't do well, it often doesn't do at all. Which is video capture. Jobs was actually very anti-video in the 2000s (and always anti-optical), and he alone is why software and hardware didn't exist until it was too late (2010s).

Quote:

You can time warp to the days of Bill Clinton like LS and setup an XP box

Too far, not 90s. You need 00s, Bush II and Obama.

Quote:

Originally Posted by aramkolt

I still haven't done my head-to-head testing, but I imagine that the one of the better Mac-oriented solutions would be:
-> Frame TBC with SDI or Component out
-> AJA KiPro recording to ProRes 422

Doubt it.

Quote:

Really all you are missing on Mac is QTGMC deinterlacing, though that is theoretically possible with the Mac Hybrid App if it functioned as intended.

Parallels works. (That's how I did QTGMC at the studio 15 years ago. Pre-process MXFs on Mac, import interlaced masters to Vista VM, QTGMC in Avisynth+AvsPmod, save to shared drive on Mac network, process next in Avid, MainConcept to streams).

Quote:

you could put a hardware deinterlacer before the KiPro such as the Snell and Wilcox Ph.C (uses motion quantization and works at least partially similarly to QTGMC),

No.

Quote:

Teranex 2D/3D/AV (uses a proprietary deinterlacing algorithm and was used in broadcast environments extremely commonly during the SD to HD transition), or use a line doubler such as the Retrotink 2x (which doesn't deinterlace per se, it just turns each field into a line doubled frame which doubles the frame rate). The Retrotink is designed for stable signals coming off of 240p/480i game consoles, but if your TBC is good enough, it *should* be able to handle stabilized analog signals as well. The AJA KiPro can be set to upscale 480i to 480p, 720p, or 1080p on its own, but I'm not sure how good it is at actually doing it compared to QTGMC or the others listed above.

No, no, and no.

Quote:

Would be kind of fun to leave the samples unlabeled (to avoid bias) and have people first decide which looks the best to them, then reveal which samples are which chain a bit later.

Fun for who? No value in games.

Quote:

Originally Posted by aramkolt

This forum is often an echo chamber of the same things being repeated without those members personally having tried alternatives, or if they have, it is compared to, at most, two other devices, often with none of them being the "recommended" devices.

No.
- I can only assume you've not read lots of posts.
- Many of the "other methods" are later abandoned as inferior, as most of them were solely sought due to costs. Not quality, but simply trying to be cheap.

Quote:

As an example, I've never seen anyone suggest using Snell and Wilcox's Ph.C on VHS via YouTube or otherwise. Doesn't mean it isn't worth trying.

Been there, done that, posts in the forum from a decade ago.

Quote:

There are a couple of professional services that do utilize Teranex 2D/3D's - for deinterlace but there really aren't good comparisons on how well it does against anything else.

There are also professional amateur services that hook up thrift store VCRs to Easycaps/Elgatos -- qualiy sucks.

Quote:

I think what we're all after is best quality transfers for the budget, OS, and availability of hardware we can get, so I don't know why we'd want to shun trying new things, especially if samples of those captures comparing can be provided, even if they are first demoed on YouTube.

But there is literally nothing new. New to you, maybe, but not new, and nothing some of us that have been around for decades haven't seen/experienced/used/tested/etc. I can appreciate your deer-in-headlights wonderment about all the video goodies that have existed in decades past. "Wow, gee whiz, look at this shiny thing I never knew about!" ... from 10/20/30 years ago.

But remember that some of us lived in those decades past, working in this field, partaking in this hobby. Some of us gladly share our experiences, so you don't have to. A wise person learns from others, a fool has to make his own mistakes.

Now, if you simply want to learn, great, have at it. Old arts should not be lost to time. But to think we've somehow missed gear is naive.

It's not an echo chamber. It's a chamber that long ago vetted gear you're just learning about, or gear don't even know about yet. Don't get too big for your britches. Students can pass teachers, but it's sure as hell not an easy task. Not as much as snot-nosed kids think. Be the wise adult, the curious artist, the tech historian ... not the "internet expert" who only knows enough to be dangerous, and giving out bad advice to others.

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Originally Posted by mbassiouny

welcome to mac world.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gary34

Is the goal of your testing just to find something cheaper?

With too many folks, that is almost always the case. (I test gear regardless of cost. I've tested $1000+ capture cards, and I've tested $4 capture cards, and most everything in between.)

Quote:

Originally Posted by aramkolt

and/or pattern generators. Use of pattern generators or DVD source should remove timebase errors from the equation, but I'll also do some tests with patterns recorded onto VHS and some "difficult" VHS tapes with various TBCs in use as well.

FYI, test pattern samples have almost zero use.

Quote:

It will be very interesting to see if the recommended chains are significantly visually different than some of the others in my testing. If the recommended chain tests are clearly better, then yeah, all this effort would have been just reinventing the wheel, but it'll give better evidence as to what specifically makes those chains better and by how much.

- Do not jump to conclusions.
- Testing is not production/live/actual use. Remember that. Sometimes items test well, but fail when put through projects.