Step up in vhs, miniDV and Video8 conversion
 

Dear all,

My name is Gert-Jan, I’m a proud owner of the one view Photography shops left in the Netherlands.
I’m doing conversions for clients for a while now but I want to step it up a notch.

My gear:

Blackmagic Analog to SDI 8x
Blackmagic studiolink 8 ports
Sony DSR40 2x
JVC BR DV3000u
Sony EV-S9000E 2x
JVC HR-S9700EU 2x

I’ve connected all machines with s-video to bnc splitter on the Black Magic analog to SDI converter.
So far so good.

De-interlacing is a problem, which program should I use for this and what is the best way for MiniDV and Video8 / hi8?
How to get a decent workflow for bigger amounts of tapes.
I want to deliver good quality for my future customers but it shouldn’t take hours and hours for
One tape.

If I need to invest in some stuff that is not a problem.
I don’t want to use a El gato capture device or something like it.

Hope you guys can help me out, I’ve signed up for premium membership because I want this awesome forums to keep existing.

My appologies for my awfull English, I hope it is readable.


Greetings, Gert-Jan

Digital tapes have different workflow than analog tapes, DV and D8 should be straight forward, A camcorder or a deck equipped with firewire port into a PC with firewire port, use SCLive to transfer the tapes into hard drive as DV format.

High quality requires multiple steps unfortunately, If speed is important to you, just keep doing what you were doing, But you can cut down on time by using multiple PC's and VCR's for capturing and processing files.

Analog tapes are a little bit complicated, Not sure if the BM analog to SDI can cope with consumer analog video signal, But there are devices form Grass Valley former Snell & Wilcox but they are hard to find, Ensemble designs still manufactures BrightEye 75 here in the US and you can still buy it from them for $1450.

You can use BM for the good tapes and add a TBC or a specific Panasonic DVD recorder as a passthrough, Capture with vdub or AmarecTV into losslessly compressed AVI using HuffYUV, De-interlace with QTGMC and encode to h.264 for final playback format.

Some of the Panasonic DIGA (passthrough) recorders or (direct voor VHS) combo's will also have component output for the mini BMD converter, which also works fine for the BMD Video Assist's
DIGA give you the VHS refresh feature which gives a stable analog video signal, "TBC like"
progressive mode doesn't work with that hardware combination though… only when Intensity Shuttle is used.(out of production, USB version is no go, only use TB2 version if available)
The BMD Hyperdeck Shuttle HD does also only support interlaced mode. 625i50
The Video Assist can be used as (to) HDMI conversion passthrough when SDI is used.
(the BMD Analog to SDI will not accept progressive (625p50) at it's input.

btw. Shutter Encoder is available for both MAC and Windows, with many good options, is very easy in use, it's a GUI to/with ffmpeg. when you want convert from ProRes/AVID to h.264/h.265