Black bar cropping with Panasonic DMR-ES15?
 

I'm using a Panasonic NV-SV1 and an I-O Data GV-USB2. I recently bought an ES15 which I'm incorporating into my workflow. I hook my VCR into the line 1 port of the ES15 with an S-Video and RCA audio cables, and hook the ES15 into my capture device with an additional set of S-Video and RCA audio cables. I'm using VirtualDub 1.10.4 for capture, which is set up in accordance to sanlyn's guide. I'm currently capturing NTSC-J tapes and have set the video standard on my capture device to NTSC_M_J.

I've noticed that, while using the ES15, there's a small amount of cropping at the top of the screen, about 2 pixels in depth. This cropping doesn't appear when I connect the VCR directly into the capture device.

My VirtualDub screen with ES15 connected vs. without ES15.
Attachment 19126 Attachment 19127

Note that this does not squish the image, rather it cuts off about 2 lines worth of information from the top of the video.

RAW capture with ES15 vs. without ES15.
Attachment 19122 Attachment 19123

The same captures after post-processing through Hybrid, again with ES15 vs. without ES15.
Attachment 19124 Attachment 19125

Any idea what might be causing this? How would I be able to fix it?

Can't say for sure, but there are actually 242.5 lines on each field in NTSC video which makes the full frame 486 lines. Capture cards and passthrough devices that process the image can sort of decide which 240 lines in each field they pass on for 480 line vertical resolution captures. Could be something like that going on here, but I don't know why it would blank the first two lines.

It really looks more like 2 lines are masked. It wouldn't surprise me if that is being masked for the purposes of keeping closed captioning data intact (if present), Did this source have closed captioning data on it? If it did, I'd expect some white dashed lines to be up there that change relatively often. My guess is this has been seen before as lots of people use ES10's, but I haven't really played around with mine enough to have noticed.

Thanks for the reply. This source doesn't have any closed captioning data on it to my knowledge.