Hardware to digitize my VHS tapes?

[Gary34]

I am wondering what hardware I need to buy to digitize my vhs tapes. I digitized some with premier pro before but I would like to do what you guys recommend and do a better job on digitizing my vhs tapes. I used premier pro because I already had it because I edited for a movie review group on YouTube. Anyways my brother passed and my mom has a bunch of tapes with him on it. I am going to start with my old wrestling tapes, which were vhs c tapes, though before I get to the older regular vhs tapes that he is in because those ones mean more to me and I wanna get everything figured out before I get to those. Here’s what I have now.
1. I have a Panasonic 1980 vcr. I got it from eBay they said it worked. They shipped it very poorly then gave me a refund on everything and told me to keep it when I told them it didn’t work. I then sent it to tgrantphoto.com and followed his shipping instructions and he did a bunch to it. He replaced parts recapped it it really works well now.
2. I have a black magic intensity shuttle which I bought because of someone on YouTube that I saw and now I am figuring out that that kind of is a capture device and not a card and maybe that and my knowledge are the weak links in the chain. I am totally open to getting rid of that if you guys think that is a good idea.
3. I have an Inspiron 5675 that I upgraded the ram to 32 gigs of ddr4 ram and added some solid state drives for when I was editing in premier pro so that I could assign the drives different task.
System model: inspiron 5675
Manufacturer: Dell
Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 1700x eight core processor, 3400 MHz, 8 cores, 16 logical processors
Ram: 32 gigs of ddr4
Drives: three solid state drives. Two regular solid state drives one 256 gb one 488 gb then a nvme solid state drive 119gb then my old disk drive that came with the computer.
4. I also have a sd tv if I need it. I used to hook one up and I would have the video going to the tv and to my editing software.

I am wondering if it is better to take everything into premier and do some color editing after capture and maybe sharpening or denoice maybe adjust the audio afterwards or do that stuff in the hardware on my vcr. I am wondering if my settings are right. I really appreciate the help with this. I am really wondering what frame TBC I should get.

[timtape]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gary34

...I am wondering if it is better to take everything into premier and do some color editing after capture and maybe sharpening or denoice maybe adjust the audio afterwards or do that stuff in the hardware on my vcr. I am wondering if my settings are right.

My general rule is the capturing of the tape data is the most important step as everything after the capture depends on it. So poor tracking of picture and sound generally can't be fixed in post as the data was lost. In post we can filter some undesirable things out but we can't put back what was lost at step 1. The importance of capture tends to be underrated.

[Gary34]

Your rule is right. Tracking really can’t be fixed on post at all though. I was wondering it about sharpening specifically because you have options to fix it in post of in capture. I hear if can cause halos if it’s done on the vcr and that it’s better to do it in post. I found a thread where lordsmurf explains this topic and I don’t have questions about that anymore. https://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vid...-playback.html. My main question is about hardware recommendations and I’m thinking now I probably shouldn’t have posted it in the general category of the forum. Anyways thanks for the input.

[mbassiouny]

> black magic intensity shuttle

You might use it, since you already have it, but don't expect it to play nice if your signal is not perfect, specially that you are not using a frame TBC with it. It is not the greatest capture card, see other posts in the forum for more details about its flaws.
Just get yourself a Hauppauge USB live2 like everyone, and/or a gv-usb2, play with them, mess with settings, see when you are happy, post samples here, etc . You can also buy a card from the marketplace of this forum.

Use these with VirtualDub, or amarecTV for capturing. Use a lossless codec, like UT video, or lagarith. Then do post-processing later.

I understand you are proud of your beast PC, but sorry, those muscles won't matter for capture and they are irrelevant. For editing post-capture, they will surely come in handy tho.

Capturing is happy with minimal specs 2-4 cores, on some 2013 I5. For best results, you boot from a drive, and you capture on a different drive, not the same one used for the OS. Boot from an SSD, but get use an old school HDD for capture.

Try to avoid windows 10, and use windows 7 if possible, you seem to have several Hard drives, so you probably can fit in an extra OS. or at least, turn off the internet during capture if you insist on using win10.


Regarding post-processing, now you can use that premier pro you mentioned, or IMHO, try to learn Avisynth/vapoursynth.
Post processing is a whole different world and can be subjective, and it is up to you to see how much correction/post-processing you want/need.

[beachcomber]

Frame TBCs are getting hard to find. Would recommend buying one from the marketplace here.

Avoid eBay, Craigslist, etc.

lordsmurf has a list of recommended TBCs. What is your budget?

[lordsmurf]

Quote:

Originally Posted by beachcomber

lordsmurf has a list of recommended TBCs.

And sometimes I have some available in the marketplace. Sometimes.

Quote:

What is your budget?

You always have to be careful asking this question, because the would-be buyer doesn't have a frame of reference, outside of the cost of a DVD player. It really is like asking a child what a car costs. 99%+ of kids have zero idea, and you get random numbers, both hilarious high and low, never close to accurate. The same happens with adults and niche items.