Capture frame rate for Hi8 tapes?
 

Hello all! I have spent the last week or so thoroughly ingesting as much info as I can from this forum before beginning my project of transferring all of my family's old Hi-8 tapes into digital.

I was not able to rig an old XP machine up for the project, so my workflow is:

Source > Sony CCD-TRV98 (the camcorder I already had, which I was happy to see on lordsmurf's recommended list!) > GV-USB2 (needed Win11 driver support) > Win11 > Vdub (lordsmurf direct download with pre-installed filters) > HuffYUV, AVI container

I followed Sanlyn's detailed Vdub setup guide (which really helped me to get comfortable with it) but I have one single remaining question that I can't seem to find an answer for. It is such a surface-level one that I know it's just a failure of my own keyword searches, but alas...

For Hi-8 tapes, what is the correct frame rate to set in Vdub?

When I play the tapes back on the camcorder display OR captured using vdub default settings (59.94), they appear to be 60fps (or 59.94). I think that this is because they're displaying deinterlaced(?)

Interlaced/progressive video still confuses me to this day. I am reading on this forum that I should be *capturing* at 29.97 for my "archival" versions, and later deinterlacing (not in Vdub?) to 59.94 when I do my filtering and re-encoding to my "shareable" version.

But in that case, I am trying to understand why in Vdub it defaulted to 59.94 on both "capture settings" and "capture pin", and I didn't even see a drop down to change framerates. I started to capture this way before noticing and the output looked great, though I have no clue if this means that it was deinterlaced by Vdub(?)

Anyway, wanting to follow best practices, in Capture>Settings, I entered 29.9700 by hand, and it stuck, but in Video>Capture Pin, I am still seeing 59.94 as the "Stream Format" and it won't let me change this. If I type 29.97, hit save, and go back into the menu, it has changed back to 59.94. Does "stream format" have anything to do with my captured output or is just for the preview in Vdub or something else? If it affected the capture I am not sure why it would allow a different value to be set than in Capture>Settings.

For what it's worth, I ran a short test capture and the output file does appear to have interlacing and be 29.97. I *definitely* want to be able to get my final product in 59.94 deinterlaced if that is in fact the way that the videos are displaying on the camcorder's built-in display, where they look amazing.

So I'm just trying to figure out if I'm all set up before I dedicate dozens of hours to capturing all of these tapes. I would hate to find out after the fact that I messed something simple up. I am capturing in 720 x 480.

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help me understand this basic aspect of NTSC analog formats. :salute:

Bonus - after these hi-8s I have a bunch of VHS that I am going to capture as well - is it the same 29.97 and change later to 59.94 for those?

Welcome. :)

Replying as I read...

Win11 is often fine, whereas 8/10 was not. (Though Win11 is not as good as XP/7, for cooperating with capture hardware/software)

The weak link here is that GV-USB card. It's been "meme'd" in recent times, lots of vocal cheerleaders (and all of them PAL users). The card simply has various issues, and that Japanese card tends to only work well with the inferior Japanese capture software AmaRecTV.

NTSC is 29.97 fps, always.
PAL is 25 fps, always.

59.94 can refer to only fields (59.94 fields/s = 29.97 frames/s).
Or 50/25 for PAL.

Determining if it's 59.94 frames or fields is what matters here.
Fields fine.
Frames not. (But you'll often want to QTGMC to 59.94/50, if deinterlacing the fields back to true frames.)

Progressive is like a cartoon flip book, one whole image at a time.

Interlaced is half of an image. Not top/bottom or left/right half, but a comb pattern. This is because old broadcasting, in the CRT days, did not have enough aerial bandwidth to transmit the entire frame. So half was sent. The way CRT TVs worked was essentially with a low refresh rate. So half the image was drawn, while the other half was fading away. You never saw the interlacing for this reason. But now, digital/LCD days, it's obvious.

Does that help? :)

Correct.
And correct, not VirtualDub for deinterlace. Use Hybrid for this. (Or manual, if needed.)

Because, as with most things in life, defaults suck. One size fits none.

I don't recall ever seeing this. It may be the GV-USB2 card (and in Win11) screwing with you. Figures.

You're smarter than the average bear. :)

Hi8 and VHS are the same for the capture settings, but the quality of the hardware matters here too. A low-end VCR, no TBCs, will not result in quality, or success (or anything usable).

Wow, did not expect such a quick reply from the man himself! Thank you for taking the time to entertain my line of questioning, and for maintaining such an amazing resource as this forum has been.

Ha! Oh believe me, I read plenty of the discourse on this forum about this card. I am coming from an all-in-one ClearClick device, if that gives you any perspective on where I was with this project a few short weeks ago. I was contemplating picking up a Digital8 camcorder to capture the DV output, but I figured that any card (well, without "easycap" or "roxio" on the box) getting a direct capture of S-Video into huffYUV would have a lot more color information and flexibility than a dated solution like DV.

Admittedly, the GV-USB2 having current drivers made the decision for me - that and I am trying to use a laptop, so no PCIe slots for an old tuner card. I have a desktop but gave to a family member who uses it for gaming. Maybe if I bite the bullet on a frame TBC at some point, I'll upgrade the GV-USB at the same time. That said, even just a glance at my .avi "masters" before any filtering/processing/restoration and they're wiping the floor with the ClearClick garbage and its visible compression artifacts, dropped frames and nasty color. So I'm happy at the moment.

I think I'm following. In Vdub capture settings, it very clearly says "frame rate" so I am thinking that changing from the default 59.94 to 29.97 was the correct move there?

It does! My confusion mostly stems from understanding the properties of interlaced video displaying on a progressive display. I have heard this description before but as a refresher it is helping me to conceptualize all of this much better. :)

Saving this for later. Thank you! So, putting what I'm learning together, I'll be deinterlacing my video from 29.97 *frames* per second to 59.94 *fields* per second?

Yeah, this is what is still stumping me. In Sanlyn's setup guide, he says in regard to the Capture Pin>Stream Format>Frame Rate setting: "Frame rate corresponds to default of the standard signal format set in "Capture Filters", below. You can change it if you want (at your own risk), or in "Capture" -> "Capture settings...".

Following that logic, the "signal format" I have set is NTSC_M. It sounds like what you're saying is that a setting of NTSC_M should yield a "default" of 29.97? Maybe a Vdub quirk? It could certainly be a quirk of the GV-USB2 but I did not see any other users of this card making mention of this.

Either way, I can change to 29.97 in "capture settings," so what I am trying to determine is whether this "stream format" that I can't change from 59.94 has any bearing on the captured file output.

Thank you again for lending your valuable time to my no doubt very newbie line of questioning. I am so fascinated by the rabbit hole of analog video capture, and have already spent multiple hours browsing on this forum "just for fun." My wife hates it :)

Well, that was definitely an upgrade. :congrats:

Just know that more upgrade are possible -- and USB, for Win11.

Yes.

Yes, and no. 29.97 raw deinterlaced makes a squatty 720x240 video. QTGMC interpolates missing data from adjacent fields, giving you 59.94 frames.

Correct.

Win11 + GV-USB is the real variable. Understand that modern Windows post-7 treats all capture cards like webcams. That often leads to issues. It's often not a pure capture card issue, or OS issue, but the combination causing conflicts. Even other hardware in the system, especially Nvidia, can cause problems.

:laugh:

Is that so? I was pretty much under the impression that if I wanted to use a Win11 machine and USB solution, this would be the only one without incredibly finicky driver support and/or absolute junk-drawer hardware like easycap (even if the USB2 is only a couple rungs up the ladder.)

If there is a better plug and play solution I'd love to hear it!

Ahhh, that makes more sense, because it's removing half the "lines" - I see! So when the camcorder appears to be playing back smooth ~59.94 deinterlaced footage on the built-in screen, it is interpolating data internally?

I am wondering if the camera is outputting this 59.94 "interpolated" over the S-video (if that is even a thing) and that is why Vdub/GV-USB2 wanted to capture it at that rate by default?

I can definitely see the interlaced lines when playing back the 29.97 capture, and I think I can see them a bit on the 59.94 capture as well although harder to notice with the smoother motion.

I guess I just want to make sure that I'm not getting a deinterlaced signal from the camera and "re-converting" it to interlaced (or otherwise treating the incoming signal incorrectly) in Vdub for no reason. This is why I was particularly trying to figure out what "Capture Pin>Stream Format>Frame rate" setting applied to, since it's still trapped at 59.94.

Again, this is all probably based on my flawed understanding of things. I'm trying to learn :D

Your camera is just previewing back 29.97 bobbed to 59.94, in a tiny preview window that isn't large enough to show the flaws. QTGMC takes resources, but a simple bob take almost nothing.

The LCD screen on the CCD-TRV98 has a physical resolution of 560x220. There is no need for it to de-interlace the video, since its resolution is too low to make a difference.