Are my captures good?
 

Hello! After a few years on this forum, trying many things and getting a lot of equipment, I wanted to know if my captures are good.

The histogram is always blue, there is never any red part, but I would still like to know what other people think.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folde...0k?usp=sharing

This is my equipment used:

JVC SR-VS30U
Datavideo TBC-3000
ATI TV Wonder HD 600 USB

JVC Settings:

B.E.S.T. : OFF
PICTURE CONTROL: NORM
O.S.D. : OFF
DIGITAL 3R: OFF
DIGITAL TBC/NR: ON

A question that I have always had is whether to leave a red line on the left side of the hisotgram as in the examples that I have seen in this forum. Like this:

https://i.gyazo.com/982e40f69907d008...b70f246d19.png

Cheers!

See also
https://www.digitalFAQ.com/forum/vid...irtualdub.html

EP / SLP tape i presume considering the bluriness of the 1st avi ( haven't checked others). Not much chroma noise, i guess that's ok

Most capture cards clip values that fall outside or 16 to 235 because those values would be clipped anyways when YUV 16 to 235 is expanded to RGB 0 to 255. Your histogram won’t show red because it Clips the colors before they can get to red. Those red values on the histogram in the picture you showed are below 16 and if they would of been on the right side they would have been above 235.

You have to have a really exceptional card to be able to capture below 16 and above 235. Then you would have to tweak the values to get them into the legal range before going to RGB. The only people that see red are people with a really exceptional card.

You can turn down the contrast on your proc amp and see the sides of the histogram come towards the center and colors that were illegal and going to be clipped are now legal and are able to get captured. Then when you turn up you brightness everything moves to the right and when you turn down your brightness it moves to the left. You just want to get it to where it won’t clip. In my pictures one of them is clipped and one of them I have adjusted so it isn’t clipping.

The tapes are recorded in SP. How do you check the chroma?

B.E.S.T should always be ON, It checks the RF signal level and adjusts the heads' coils current for an optimum RF signal, Some people believe that it works only with tapes recorded with B.E.S.T, but that's a misconception, the feature in recording has nothing to do with itself in playback, completely two independent processes. I believe JVC designed it for worn tapes like rental where you see a lot RF drop outs due to weak signal.

The other misconception is that people think B.E.S.T improves picture quality, wrong. It improves RF signal avoiding potential miss tracking, RF drop outs (RF noise), Relieves the DOC from working hard or exceed its buffer, reducing HiFi buzzing. It works at the RF level before the signal is decoded into video, Blanking signals and HiFi audio.

During recording, it records few tracks on the tape, play them back and checks the RF level and adjusts the heads' coils current for an optimum recording.

Thank you very much for the clarification, but
I have always had it OFF because I have read it a lot on the forum, LS says it too.

What are some of the more "common" exceptional cards that can record 0-255? Can the tweaking that you describe be done after the capture or are you saying they get clipped as the YUY2 AVI file is written?

Thanks!

It would be better if these were uploaded directly to the site by direct stream in the original YUV colorspace. If something happens to those google links later no one will have the video this thread is talking about.

VirtualDub in "full processing mode" saves as uncompressed RGB by default. So the resulting video is not huffyuv compressed and will be be pretty large. Change your "Video" menu setting from "full processing mode" to "direct stream copy" after making your cut and before saving the AVI, in order to get a smaller huffyuv video.

You well be able to get like a ten second clip because of the 100 mb limit

Most of what you have read is misleading or flat out wrong, The comparison pictures shown online are useless because as I said it reduces problems not improves picture quality directly, Kind of like a frame TBC, it avoids problems, it has no direct effect on the quality of the image. Another example say the error correction algorithm of a CD player, A good player has a better correction algorithm, therefore it avoids more problems and gives compatibility with more bad or scratched CDs than a player that has a crappy error correction algorithm, In both cases the audio quality is the same when there is no problem. Hope this helps.

I don’t know about common but I was thinking of the ATI AIW cards with the theater 200 chip. Those are really the top of the line as far as capture cards. That’s a big part of the reason they tell us to capture using windows XP OS. There’s more quality capture cards with XP. https://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vid...ntage-ati.html
https://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vid...5-ati-aiw.html

I’m not sure if they capture 0-255. They well capture some illegal values and you have to correct them in software before YUV gets mapped to RGB.

^ This. And great CD example. :congrats:

^ This. Also Theatre 100/Rage can be fine.

I'm not an XP fan. But my goal is the best capture, not to make a gaming PC. I started to capture at a time when 60gb was "large", and I vividly recall driving an hour (one way) to Fry's to buy the new "biggest ever" 320gb WD HDD IDE/UDMA33/ATAPI around early 2002. So 2tb SSD that can be easily swapped is a trifle, on an Intel 7th gen setup from 2017. You can make some beefy XP AIW rigs, if you want to.

Starting today I am going to enable it. Thanks so much for the explanation!

What are the best AIW capture cards? Thanks!

You have a pretty awesome capture card already and a proc amp. You have really good gear.