I have packed all my gear away until the Panasonic DMR ES15 arrives, but I had kept some of the test captures, attached. The "Sobolewski" captures, in ProRes Proxy at ~5mbps, are from a home movie made in 1987. A friend who has loaned me his PC laptop, did so if I captured his one and only VHS tape. "Raiders", in ProRes 422HQ at ~50mbps, is from a commercial VHS. Both are PAL.
Both these tapes play nicely on TV. No artifacts whatsoever. But, the Sobolewski is unwatchable when captured, yet the Raiders one is quite okay. Same setup in every case, but I ran the Sobolewski captures at a lower bit rate.
VCR: JVC HR S6960 connected via S-video to…
Capture unit: AJA Io LA connected via Firewire 800 to…
Computer: 2011 iMac, running under Snow Leopard using AJA's VJR Xchange
Sobolewski 01 is before the video starts. Everything should be black, but we have a green flash.
Sobolewski 02 is at the start of the video, taken on a wobbly tripod. It has one weird flash.
Sobolewski 03 is a nasty piece of work. Puts me of capturing at home, I can tell you that much.
Raiders: a nice piece of work, ProRes 422HQ at 10 bit.
The Raiders capture came before the Sobolewski captures, and I didn't go back to check that Raiders still captured okay. Maybe the AJA suffered a serious fault inside during the Sobolewski captures.
I still don't get it:
- All my 20 or so tapes, PAL and NTSC, play nicely on TV. So the problems don't lie with the tapes.
- My setup can capture data rates of at least 60mbps (the "Raiders" capture), so the "Sobolewski" problem cannot be explained away as a data transfer problem – because they run at only 5mbps. In addition, the exact same AJA unit, running on a similar iMac and similar software, has succesfully captured "Raiders", in Melbourne, at uncompressed rates.
-- merged --
I've just imported the Sobolewski video into Premiere to have a look. I've never bothered with
Properties before, but there's a wealth of info there:
File Path: /Volumes/TSB USB DRV/T.mov
Type: QuickTime Movie
File Size: 120.7 MB
Image Size: 720 x 576
Frame Rate: 25.00
Total Duration: 00:01:57:08
Pixel Aspect Ratio: 1.0940
QuickTime Details:
Movie contains 1 video track(s), 0 audio track(s) and 1 timecode track(s).
Video:
This movie appears to have DROPPED FRAMES.
There are 2246 frames with a duration of 1/25th.
There is 1 frame with a duration of 3/25ths.
There are 4 frames with a duration of 4/25ths.
There are 4 frames with a duration of 1/5th.
There are 3 frames with a duration of 6/25ths.
There are 3 frames with a duration of 7/25ths.
There is 1 frame with a duration of 8/25ths.
There are 6 frames with a duration of 9/25ths.
There are 7 frames with a duration of 2/5ths.
There are 10 frames with a duration of 11/25ths.
There are 10 frames with a duration of 12/25ths.
There are 2 frames with a duration of 13/25ths.
There are 2 frames with a duration of 22/25ths.
There is 1 frame with a duration of 23/25ths.
There is 1 frame with a duration of 1/second.
There is 1 frame with a duration of 57/25ths.
There is 1 frame with a duration of 72/25ths.
Video track 1:
Duration is 0:01:57:08
Average frame rate is 19.64 fps
Video track 1 contains 1 type(s) of video data:
Video data block #1:
Frame Size = 720 x 576
Compressor = Apple ProRes 422 (Proxy)
Quality = Most (5.00)
Timecode:
Timecode track 1 contains 1 type(s) of data:
Timecode data block #1:
Start Time = 00:00:00:00
Reel name = 001
