I am in the USA and attempting to capture dozens of 25-30+ year old NTSC format video8 (not hi8) and VHS family tapes to digital format. I have closely followed the advice from LS and others on this forum on PC, equipment, and OS/software/setup recommendations on this forum and have finally after 3 months of putting together the equipment and researching on this site and the forums (which have been an indispensable resource) started capturing some videos this week. I have spared no expense in getting the right equipment for the job, but the initial capture results have been slightly underwhelming. I am using the following:
PC:
ASUS P5PE-VM Motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 CPU
2GB RAM (2 x 1GB)
ATI AIW 9200 SE AGP (PAL version, although I believe this only impacts the TV tuner section - can anyone here confirm if using a PAL version AIW is an issue for NTSC analog captures?)
TB SC sound card connected internally to capture card using MPC-4 cable.
80GB IDE OS drive
2TB Seagate SATA capture drive
Latest Window XP integral edition
Virtualdub 1.9.11 downloaded from this site
Standard
huffyuv 2.1.1 (32-bit non-MT)
ATI AIW Drivers downloaded from this website
22" computer monitor connected using D-SUB VGA connector and running 1920x1080.
TBC:
Datavideo TBC-1000
Camcorder:
Sony NTSC CCD-TRV87 (built-in TBC, on recommended list)
It is connected as follows: S-video output on camcorder to s-video input on TBC-1000, then "A" channel s-video output from TBC output to the s-video input purple ATI AIW breakout box.
Capturing all video at 720x480 resolution.
I have followed the instructions on setting up
VirtualDub properly "to a T" in the capture screen menu settings:
https://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vid...-settings.html
As well as followed the instructions on how to "properly" crop the overscan in the video8 tapes using the "Resize" filter as I had overscan issues:
https://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vid...erly-crop.html
Horizontally 8 pixels/lines of overscan from the left side of screen are being cropped (zero from the right). - does this need to also come out of the right side even though there are no issues on the right side?
Vertically 8 pixels/lines of overscan from the bottom of the image are being cropped (zero from the top). - does this need to also come out of the top side of the image even though there are no issues on the top side?
The end result using the cropping and padding overscan method (using the resize filter) is that the capture completes as expected at 720x480 after removing the overscan lines horizontally and vertically. The video is being captured at 29.97 FPS.
The captured video that's an issue is 45GB, and a little over an hour long. It has a solid-stable picture overall due to the multiple TBCs and good quality camcorder, but a major prevalence upon PC playback of the horizontal (I suspect interlace) lines that makes the image look quite frankly hard to look at at times. The camcorder, when connected directly using composite video (yellow RCA) to a 55" 1080P Panasonic plasma television, plays the tape back extremely well (as good as video8 can look), so it isn't the tape source material or camcorder. Looks great on the 1080P TV. I don't see any dropped video frames being reported in the recordings.
I have only attempted to capture less than a handful of tapes. The others were ok in terms of quality, although nothing spectacular. The high-quality video I see when playing the tapes on the TV is missing from the captures due to the horizontal lines issue. It just seems more prevalent in this particular tape.
Attached are a couple of paused screenshots of the capture video (of people's hands), the statistics provided by virtualdub after capture is completed, along with the information windows is showing has been captured of the video. I can provide more capture video screenshots if needed.
Main questions: Am I doing something wrong, or is this an uncontrollable result of playing interlaced analog source material on a non-interlaced 1080P computer monitor? I don't see horizontal lines to this extent on people's VHS recordings on youtube and other sites. Do I need a NTSC specific AIW card - could that be the issue? If using the cropping and resizing method to eliminate an even number of overscan lines on one axis, do I need to remove an equal number of lines from the other end, even if the other end of that axis does not have overscan issues? Is that a contributing factor or cause of this issue?
Any help on resolving this issue will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
