JVC quality darker than Panasonic VCR?
 

I recently have started the process of converting copious amounts of old VHS tapes. I have a great VHS deck from LS, and I have a not as great Panasonic VHS. I'm using an old iMac (mid-2010) and a program called VideoGlide Capture to capture the video. What I've noticed is that it seems like my Panasonic without TBC is giving me a better picture. It's clear the JVC with TBC is more suited to play the tape and less jumpiness, but the overall picture seems darker and not quite as crisp. Any suggestions or comments? I'm attaching some screen grabs of the recording. The right is the Panasonic and the left is the JVC with TBC. I'm also attaching my settings that I'm using for the capture. I'm a little new at this, but I tried to include all relevant deals, but if I missed something, please let me know. Thank you! :)

Dark:
- The JVC S-VHS is giving accurate results, not dark at all.
- The Panasonic VHS has drained all the color, and has washed out the image, making it far too bright. In the first image with people, notice how leaves are now white, not green. This is typical of low-end decks, it ruins video conversions.

Detail:
- The Panasonic has halos -- black/dark and white/light outlines on objects. That's false sharpening. It's not actual detail, the "crisp" is fake. It reminds me of kindergarten, where we'd outline the areas first, then color inside, to" stay inside the lines" (in effect we made our own lines, ignoring the black printed lines).
- In that wide aerial shot, the JVC is not handling NR well, so turn it off for this tape. Put the JVC picture mode into EDIT, in the menu, which disables NR. But realize it adds back the tape's noise (like that Panasonic). And noise is seen in motion, not stills. Sometimes, some tapes go too soft from NR, but not often.

Thank you LS! That all makes sense, and I appreciate the feedback greatly. I'll give it a shot!

Color can be subjective, and can be altered in post. For the heck of it I adjusted the colors of the JVC versions in Photoshop to more closely match the Panasonic versions of both images.

Never really done color correction in AviSynth for example, besides just lowering the brightness a bit of all my captures since I increase the brightness of my captures to prevent crushed blacks and clipped whites.

What show is that? :)

A bit off topic but the JVC's more saturated colors got me wanting to test out coloring correcting terrible quality blooper footage sourced from one of those low quality blooper compilation tapes.

It ain't the VCR fault's, but the nature of the source footage being not the best.

Since color can vary greatly from scene to scene, I usually just don't bothering with doing any color correction.

Yeah, I think your specific post there shows source and tint issues. The tint issues are also a byproduct of nth gen recording.

To me, this looks mostly like saturation, contrast, and black levels being different between the two. If the levels are off "enough", you won't be able to correct them in post (crushed blacks/blown out whites in particular). Ideally I'd say use a proc amp and waveform monitor to know for sure that you are in legal ranges for those.

I don't see a whole lot of difference in terms of halos, but I may be a bit biased in doing a lot of U-Matic transfers recently where obvious halos are in almost every high-contrast image if not a first generation tape.

Interesting that you're capturing in DVCPro50 which is basically the 4:2:2 version of Consumer DV25 that takes up twice as much space. I do have some hardware that I think can create a DVCPro50 stream that I've yet to experiment with, but SDI/ProRes422 is more widely used when in those sort of bitrates and is also very (modern) Mac friendly. Not saying change your whole capture setup if. you're happy with it, but might be worth looking into if your goal is Mac compatibility.

I don't see that mentioned anywhere. :hmm:

It’s on the third picture in the first comment.

Ah-ha! Yeah, it's probably related to Mac OS X and Videoglide, not many codec options exist. Long ago, Huffyuv could be installed via Perian, but that's been unavailable for years.

I am not sure about your settings. Those aren’t the default settings from what I am seeing online but I’m not familiar with that software. It would be a better comparison I think if it was a known good card using Huffy into Vdub.

I believe it is impossible to decide what is right and what is wrong by simply compare 2 images (at least brightness and colours) if you do not know what you get out of your VCR in accordance with calibration tape (or how exactly it is captured).
Subjective I would take something between them :)
In my opinion everyone should have at least one test cassette like that.
I have several, this is universal test.
Play it and you will see all what you need for quick test.

For this comparison, that would be an incorrect assessment, as the issues are obvious.

Yes, issues are obvious, but in my opinion before starting to do something you should be sure devices are up to specs. And then you can start to compare. For example, if there would be pictures of test patterns from both VCR, problems would be immediately visible.

I know the JVC is to spec, and I suspect the Panasonic is as well. What I see here is a known known, there's really not any unknowns/variables in this specific instance.

However, in general, I would agree with you.

Well but how it can be, than both VCR are up to spec but there is dramatic difference in basic things? If both are calibrated with standard calibration tapes we can talk about minor but important differences. Like why (sorry, example is from audio where I have all necessary knowledge) Studer A80 is the best (because of transport, however Telefunken M15 audio amplifier is better but we talk not about even 0,5 db but about 0,2 db difference (sometime) in flat response and so on). So the same league devices definitely all should be about the same (except some terrible well known examples) if calibrated properly.

It's because the generic low-end VHS VCRs were calibrated to overdu contrast, sharpness, etc. This was by design. This is also why people have a horrid idea of what a "good picture" looks like, because they've been trained to like high contrast, oversaturation, etc. VHS lacked true black, so pumping contrast gave it blacker-than-black. This would never fly with pro/prosumer gear. We need accuracy, not image butchering. And image butchery is not what you want to archive videotapes as digital.

Reminds me how there are a good amount of VHS rips on YouTube that have high contrast blown out colors that make my eyes want to melt.

Case in point, the opening of the Jaws Widescreen VHS where I decided to upload a much better quality version of it, not the exact frame but it gets the point across.

Now you are going to have those low quality bootleg or public domain tapes where the over saturated/contrast image is just baked into the source, and it's not the playback VCR's fault. It's because the tapes were just cheaply made with no craps given about quality.

Ok, thanks, I understand. I was messed up a bit with those particular models :). In Europe in 1980s and early 90s Panasonic was major brand in professional and consumer video. TV studios worked mostly with Panasonic equipment. Betacam was mostly Sony. And all decks were up to specs, even consumer. All that cheap crap started about in the middle of 90s (if I remember right) along with some decent decks.