Hello,
First, thank the forum for the wealth of knowledge and experience. Thanks to the various guides and posts on this forum, I put a capture workflow together over the past month and a half, and it's been working flawlessly (up until now). I have only used it to capture my family's Hi8 tapes, but I also plan to capture some Betamax tapes from an old BetaMovie camcorder in the future. My setup is as follows:
Sony DCT-TRV350>Panasonic DMR-ES15>Visiontek TV Wonder 600 USB
I am capturing on an old Dell XPS 9000 with Windows 7. Both camcorders tested were passed through the ES15 with good S-Video cables. All captures were done with
VirtualDub 1.9.11 +
HuffYUV. The camcorder's TBC is was enabled.
After initially troubleshooting a few common problems, I have captured about 20 tapes with no dropped or inserted frames or noticeable defects. That was until I tried to capture one of the older tapes in our collection. I monitored the first 20 minutes of the capture, and everything was fine (demonstrated in the first attached clip). I left momentarily and returned to a blue screen, which usually indicates the tape is over. I thought there was much more to go on the tape, so I hit FF and suddenly saw the video that was supposed to be there. The second I hit play, it went back to the blue screen. I stopped the capture and noticed that just before the playback cut out, there were many horizontal white lines (dropouts, comets?) on the tape. You can see this in the second attached clip. Playback was distorted on the camcorder's LCD along with the
VirtualDub preview, so I don't think this relates to my capture setup.
I have an old, beat-up CCD-TR200 that was used to record this tape, so I popped the tape in and played back the offending section. Instead of the blue screen I had previously, I was getting the jittery mess you can see in clip 4. I have been searching forums for quite a while, and so far I haven't encountered a post with a problem that looks exactly like this, My apologies if this is a common problem that has been discussed previously.
I recorded the rest of the tape using the TR200, and it cycles between extreme distortion and relatively clean playback. The is fine for most of the worst parts of the tape, but it does cut out in one section. The clean sections still have some horizontal lines but are at least useable, as seen in clip 3.
I assume this is likely a camera issue from when the tape was originally recorded or tape degradation/damage. However, one strange aspect of this issue is that the distorted areas are not in the same places when played back with each camcorder. You can see in attachments 2 and 3, the same section of video is terrible through the TRV350 but much cleaner with the TR200. I have not recorded or played back the tape multiple times to see if the playback issues happen in different spots with the same camcorder, since I am not sure if it's a good idea to keep playing the tape. This inconsistency could also be related to the Camcorder's TBC function being enabled on the TRV350.
I stopped on one of the distorted areas and popped open the dust flap to inspect the tape. It seems fine to me and looks the same as any of my other tapes. The tape curls inward slightly in the center where it's unsupported, but the other tapes I checked looked the same, and they have no playback issues. It is a Sony Hi8 Metal P120 tape with no physical signs of damage or improper storage, at least to my inexperienced eyes.
I have also fast-forwarded and rewound the tape completely, with no noticeable difference.
I'm under the impression that this is either tape degradation or a problem with the original recording. This is one of our oldest tapes, so it may have just degraded over time or been exposed to moisture or other detrimental environmental factors. To my knowledge, all of our tapes have been stored in a cool dry room, played back very sparingly, and were not usually reused.
I want to pop the tape back in my TRV350 to see if I can get better quality out of the decent portions of the tape, but my TRV350 camcorder is in immaculate condition, and I do not want to risk damaging the heads, or anything else. That might be a foolish concern, but I wanted to run this issue by the forum before going any further. I have tested a previously captured tape in the TRV350, and it plays back clean.
All of the uploaded clips have been encoded and deinterlaced with Hybrid as X264 mp4 using my usual settings. If requested, I can upload raw AVI captures, but I figured I should encode them to fit in the attachment.
Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated. If this tape is junk, then so be it. It has some very important moments, though, so if you have any suggestions or knowledge to share, that would be fantastic.
