Canopus ADVC-110 for digitizing Hi8?

[Sevo030]

Hello, im planning on digitizing 30 old hi8 tapes. And i also want to record on hi8 from time to time and trasfer it to my computer because I like the look of it.

My problem is that im very confused about which device i should buy.

I already read alot about this online and some people state that you defenitely need to invest like 1k for a good setup.

I read that things like time base correction or y/c separation are important or necessary to get a good looking result.

I found an offer for the canopus advc 110 online and found out that this device is said to be good, even though it only has a lite version of the time base correction and no y/c separation. I read that it records in the dv format that compresses color but i want to record pal so it is 4:2:0 that is said to be ok.

My question is if anyone can tell me whether or not i will get ok results with this card because Im new to all this and cant spend 1k on the Equipment.

And I also want to alrady Thank you for answering💪

[latreche34]

How about starting with a good Hi8 or D8 camcorder with S-Video out that plays back analog tapes and built in line TBC and a good USB capture device and start experimenting, DV boxes are not recommended

[lordsmurf]

Welcome.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sevo030

Hello, im planning on digitizing 30 old hi8 tapes.
I already read alot about this online and some people state that you defenitely need to invest like 1k for a good setup.
I read that things like time base correction or y/c separation are important or necessary to get a good looking result.

Correct, for any degree of quality, you need the proper tools. Good tools costs money, like any tool for a DIY task, or hobby, or profession. For analog video ingest, TBCs (both line and frame) are those tools. It's a boring item like a lawnmower, and yet essentially to successful completion of the task.

Y/C is s-video, also correct.

Quote:

I found an offer for the canopus advc 110 online and found out that this device is said to be good, even though it only has a lite version of the time base correction and no y/c separation.

Whatever you read, or watched, was 100% false. The Canopus ADVC-50/55/100/112 boxes do not contain any TBC of any kind. None, zilch, nada. Does not exist. (The ADVC-300 has a weak line TBC that does a horrible job, either entirely inert, or making the video worse. It's based a very primitive Panasonic chip.)

DV is a 1990s technology, and had a minimum computer spec of Pentium II, with a Pentium III required. It's ancient technology that was obsolete by the 2000s, and should almost never be used. It destroys color information (reduces, "cooks"/alters color), and adds blocks. It's often worse than MPEG (DVDs).

Quote:

I read that it records in the dv format that compresses color but i want to record pal so it is 4:2:0 that is said to be ok.

It's only "ok" when you're unable to do better. That's a rare instance, often users stuck on Macs (usually old OS X), no access to Windows.

Quote:

My question is if anyone can tell me whether or not i will get ok results with this card because Im new to all this and cant spend 1k on the Equipment.

That box is often overpriced, and a waste of money, compared to better lossless cards. The choice isn't binary, between €1k and overpriced ADVC boxes. There are other better options, wiser use of funds, better quality gear.

Quote:

And i also want to record on hi8 from time to time and trasfer it to my computer because I like the look of it.

It really is a great analog format, and I consider it the best that we had as consumers. Sadly, I didn't realize that until the 2000s, long after we'd used VHS and VHS-C for our family memories.

Quote:

Originally Posted by latreche34

How about starting with a good Hi8 or D8 camcorder with S-Video out that plays back analog tapes and built in line TBC and a good USB capture device and start experimenting, DV boxes are not recommended

Yes, good camera required.

[Sevo030]

Hello again and sorry for the late respond.

In the meantime I experimented with the "Elgato Video Capture" in Virtual Dub and got very bad results.
I have the problem that from time to time the video randomly freezes (tried almost all Virtual dub settings: Buffer, Audio/Video sync etc.).

I also read a lot about TBCs and found out, that my hi8 camera has a built-in line TBC (Sony CCD-TRV69E)

I do not know if this is because of the lack of an full frame TBC but I assume it could be the reason.

Because Im on a budget I still consider a dv box like the canopus ADVC 110, but I dont know if it would really fix the issue.

I would really like to know if there are other options avaliable in that price range that would do a sufficient job.

merry (late) christmas to everyone

[latreche34]

Lack of frame TBC could be part of the problem but I think you should address the elephant in the room first, get a working capture device, Elgato is not a good one despite some YT reviews that suggest it is a good one.

[lordsmurf]

It's both. Lack of frame TBC, lack of quality capture card.

I always hate seeing when people are still struggling to get a good capture after months, or even years. The enemy here is always yourself, unwilling to spent funds to buy the needed tools. It's like refusing to buy a stove, and trying to cook all food with a lighter. You're just going to burn yourself, the food is still frozen, and you're still hungry.

"only 30" tapes doesn't really matter. Buy it, use it, resell it. It's a project cost, not a permanent cost. Whatever is not recovered on resale is the rental/project fee.

[aramkolt]

You'll get quite a few different opinions, but if you want to just see what DV looks like and if it'll meet your needs, really all you need is a Digital8 camcorder that can play back Hi8 tapes (not all of them do) be sure it also has stereo output for sound, and an internal line TBC. That'll have firewire output by default and will internally convert to firewire at the output. Alternatively, you can use it to play back the tapes via S-Video and convert via the usual analog means and still have the line TBC active.

In your situation, I would first ask any family members if they have any older camcorders you could borrow - most MiniDV and Digital8 camcorders did have passthrough to go from analog to firewire/DV and even if it doesn't have a TBC or stereo out, you can get an idea if that's the "look" you're going for.

This video probably shows one of the better direct comparisons between DV and a traditional capture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVXp7cjJT8Q

Their conclusion was that video levels were a bit too light and some of the light areas were probably clipped. For the added hassle of a traditional capture vs DV (no audio sync issues and you can probably get away without a separate TBC) this may or may not be enough of an issue to avoid DV.

Color accuracy is probably also lacking a bit with at least some DV converting chips as can be seen here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPtYzD6kNNk&t=385s

Seems that at least in this example, color has some added red throughout. This is probably correctable or could at least be improved in post-capture editing, so that depends if that matters enough to you or not as to whether that is worth avoiding. I haven't seen a comparison that shows if any of the DV conversion devices do a better job than others in terms of color accuracy and avoiding clipping of bright areas. That'd be a comparison between say a Sony DV camcorder passthrough vs Canopus device vs other brands of camera passthrough.

I would argue that if you go the DV method, your captures will be better than 95% of what most people are doing with devices like the Elgato or anything that you could purchase off of Amazon right now etc. Could it be better? Sure. Pretty much any other method will be more complicated and expensive though, and that's up to you to decide what is important. DV basically takes the simplicity of Elgato and vastly improves the quality while preserving interlacing at the cost of a much larger file size and needing a firewire device for the capture part. You still will need to deinterlace, so there is some post-processing involved before you have your shareable file. Files will also be muuuuch larger in the neighborhood of 12GB per hour as opposed to Elgato's 2.5GB per hour. Traditional lossless captures are larger yet, something like 30GB or more per hour.

As for color compression - that's an interesting one. most consumer SD video never really had more than 40 effective lines of horizontal color resolution to begin with, so if you sample 1 in every 4 horizontal pixels for color and the horizontal resolution is 720, you are sampling something like 160 lines of color from something that only had 40 lines if you're using 4:1:1 subsampling. 4x oversampling is generally considered to be a good approximation of an analog signal, and DV does give you that. In PAL land however, you're just throwing away every other horizontal line of color data which is probably more detrimental for color detail than 4:1:1 is for low resolution sources. There, you'll be sampling 360 times per horizontal line (in something that only had 40 values to begin with), but capturing none of the color in half of the lines. It is true that YouTube and most modern formats do 4:2:0, but that's a bigger problem when your low resolution source is missing half of the lines of color data. If you were to say upscale the 4:1:1 content to 720p for YouTube and then it throws away every other line of color AFTER the upscale, that'd be far less noticeable. So I'd argue 4:1:1 is better than 4:2:0 for low horizontal color resolution SD, but that's just my logic, could be wrong of course.

As for whether DV has any sort of TBC effect, the test I'd propose for that is timecode generator put right before the input of the DV capture device that'll burn in a unique time code visibly to each frame and also output LTC audio which can be then captured by the DV converter. You'd know if frames were dropped due to the total length of the video file captured based on subtracting the starting and ending time code that is visibly burnt into the first and last frame and see if the concurrently captured timecode audio agrees or not. You'd also want to check the total number of frames in the file to see if it agrees with the LTC audio and burnt in time code.

What is well established is that DV capture devices never have audio sync issues which is the main reason for a frame TBC (well, that and vertical jumpiness). I do also believe there's a line-TBC-like effect to most DV hardware converters as well where they'll fix *most* horizontal wobbling assuming it is a first generation/original recording tape. If anyone has links to a DV capture that has horizontal wobbling present, I'd like to see it.

All that said, with everything I've acquired hardware wise, I wouldn't be too shocked if the difference between using an ideal setup vs DV was relatively minor in most viewing scenarios (ie on a cell phone screen), and I'll eventually be doing that comparison. New years resolution is to stop buying stuff and start actually testing it. Probably doesn't help that I decided to get into U-Matic players too here just recently haha. For an actual transfer business or my own memories that I'm rather picky about, I'd use an "ideal setup", but if recommending something to family and friends that aren't as techy and don't have the budget, I'd have little hesitation about recommending DV over whatever else they'd have likely come up with on their own that they could still buy on Amazon.

[latreche34]

The only complaint I have about capturing analog tapes to DV is lack of control over levels, In an analog capture device you can adjust levels to minimize the damage done during shooting, but with DV the file is finalized and you would have to decode it and do a post adjustments which is kind of too late already since the wrong levels are baked in.

[aramkolt]

Agree that I don't like the idea of clipping brights, though I think the workaround is probably a simple/low cost variable resistor as a voltage divider to ground on luma only which a few other users have posted about. Blacks really won't get clipped, especially if something like the ADVC-110 is set to black=0IRE. I also suspect that there are some DV converters out there that have better AGC where they won't clip, but I haven't seen too many direct comparisons against different DV hardware converters in that aspect specifically. I know Sony made a few standalone hardware converters - I bought one for testing, but haven't tested it yet. I was kind of surprised to see that there were ZERO electrolytic capacitors inside of the Sony, whereas the ADVC family has something like 15 or more SMT electrolytic caps. I've had to recap every ADVC-110 to get them to work, but they worked fine after. I do kind of wonder if the clipping could be bad cap related maybe? Since I haven't heard of anyone else recapping theirs, could be contributing in some way maybe, or maybe that's responsible for the "blockiness" some report? Datavideo also made some DV to hard drive/flash storage devices as well, could be they don't have the clipping issue.

Interestingly, ADVC must have know that certain capacitors inside were prone to fail, because they did use some organic polymer SMTs for specific caps which you didn't see a lot of back then - those should really never be replaced since they don't tend to go bad and have an extremely low ESR to begin with. You can typically tell them apart because they'll have red, purple, or green markings on top as opposed to black, and they'll test very low ESR in circuit as well.

[Sevo030]

Thanks to all of you for answering and the detailed descriptions.
I think I will reconsider my approach. And then decide what to buy.

[Gary34]

Quote:

The only complaint I have about capturing analog tapes to DV is lack of control over levels

Does control over levels really matter with a capture card. I understand it matters with a proc amp because you can change the signal before it gets processed and becomes the picture but making adjustments on the card doesn’t seem like it would be any different than making adjustments in software after capture.

[latreche34]

Not all DV devices have proc-amp controls, so once the DV file is created it's too late. Proc amp adjustment are done at the ADC stage, As long as the file kept lossless, doing those adjustment in post should not make a big difference, but if the files are encoded to DV or other codecs it is too late.

[Gary34]

All capture cards DV or not make adjustments too late. They aren’t changing an analogue signal at that point. They are working in the digital realm. I don’t think there is a difference between using the adjustments in a capture card and making adjustments in post after capture.

[latreche34]

I don't think you understand the concept of DSP (digital signal processing) in video, The worst you can do to the signal is process it in the analog domain, get an analog proc-amp and try it for yourself and see how shitty the quality is, Digital processing can achieve better results due to the nature of lossless processing, the analog signal gets sampled into digital and processed digitally with minimum loss. Not just proc amps in capture cards work this way, TBC, DNR, mixing consoles, character generators even the VCR menus all work the same way. But once that digital signal gets encoded into DV, MPEG-2 or any other codec, it has incurred a loss already, decoding it and processing it makes it even worse.

[Gary34]

Quote:

get an analog proc-amp and try it for yourself and see how shitty the quality is,

I have a TBC 3000 that I got from the original owner and he used if for a month. It was kept in his office since. It’s possibly a 5th gen. Even LS hasn’t tested the 5th gens. I drove to the guys house to pick it up. It’s never been shipped from person to person. I don’t use the proc amp on my card. I raise and lower the volume with an audio mixer then use the proc amp on my TBC to adjust levels. The proc amp on that is strong. Anyways when you make corrections on a capture card the capture card clips then you make corrections. When you make corrections on a proc amp you push it into legal range then capture. I know I’m not going to tell you anything new but I’m just saying capture cards don’t avoid clipping and a proc amp does. I don’t see the difference in using the proc amp on the card vs using software post capture.

[latreche34]

The proc amp in your TBC and the capture card work the same way, the only difference is that in TBC you have no range reading indication, the capture card does give you the reading, Your TBC is before the capture card because it cannot be connected after the capture card, It doesn't mean it is processing in analog, it is digitizing the signal first, then processing it and then converting it back to analog.

[Aya_Rei]

Adjusting the proc amp of the capture card to prevent clipping during capture is still noticeable, granted I've mainly see the improvement when I capture footage from my Playstation 3 onto Hi8 tape using a Sony CCD TRV-66 camcorder, as oppose to footage shot from camcorders, probably due to exposure and the values being clipped when the tape was recorded to.

Here is an example, was playing back gameplay footage I recorded of Antonblast using my PS3 to view the video file. I intentionally increased the contrast by 75 afterwards to make the differences more noticeable.
https://imgsli.com/MzM0Mzgy

I originally captured the footage with the brightness decreased by 10 and the contrast increased by 18. That's the first image, second one is those values reversed in order to match the image on what it'd look like if it was captured without any proc amp adjustments by the card to begin with.

I only adjusted the levels using the capture card, do have a Cypress TBC that has it's own proc amp controls, but those are left at default

[latreche34]

Yes, nothing reverses a badly shot footage to its original values, there is no question about it, But having some control over levels better than having none.

[Gary34]

Quote:

Your TBC is before the capture card because it cannot be connected after the capture card, It doesn't mean it is processing in analog, it is digitizing the signal first, then processing it and then converting it back to analog.

If you look on the back of a TBC 3000 there is a composite monitor plug in. When you plug that into a CRT and adjust the proc amp the image on the CRT is free of any proc amp adjustments but you can see the adjustments you made on the preview window in Virtualdub. That would lead me to think that the monitor output is after the timebase corrections and before the analog proc amp adjustments.

Quote:

The proc amp in your TBC and the capture card work the same way, the only difference is that in TBC you have no range reading indication, the capture card does give you the reading

They don’t look like they work the same way to me when I compare them.

[latreche34]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gary34

That would lead me to think that the monitor output is after the timebase corrections and before the analog proc amp adjustments.

Your assumption is wrong.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gary34

They don’t look like they work the same way to me when I compare them.

Work the same way and produce the same results are two distinctive descriptions, It's like saying cars work the same way, so why they don't have the same horsepower.