VHS capture workflow for Mac?

[gmanrockstar]

Hello,

I am in the process of acquiring pieces of my workflow and need some advice.

I am capturing VHS and VHS-C tapes (mainly home movies, mix of SP and EP, NTSC). I would love a recommendation for how to handle the VHS-C tapes. What are the best adapters to use?

I recently purchased a fully rebuilt JVC HR-S9900U (https://ebay.us/m/lsQKbd).

I have nearly given up on a frame TBC. I have looked for DataVideo TBC-1000’s and AVT-8710’s (green model), with no luck. If there is another decent model that I should search for, please let me know.

I am now looking for a capture card. I have a few options for computers, all Macs (which I understand is not the best option, but it’s what I have).

Here are the machines I have that I feel are worth mentioning:
1. 2012 Mac Pro running Mac OS X 10.13, 10.10, and 10.9
2. PowerMac G4 running Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5
3. Multiple Intel and ARM based MacBook Pros and Mac Minis running up to macOS 11.

I am curious if a PCIe capture card (in the Mac Pro) would produce better results than a USB capture card? I have been looking at the Blackmagic DeckLink Studio 2 and the Blackmagic Intensity Pro 4K. Similarly, a PCI capture card in the PowerMac G4, if that is even worth consideration.

I have seen the "ATI 600 USB, Tevion clone version, for WinXP-11 or OS X to 10.14" on the marketplace from lordsmurf. Is this my best option with Mac OS?

If it really makes a large difference in quality, I will look into buying a Windows XP machine. Although, I would prefer to stick with the Macs if possible. How large of a difference would using Windows XP make here?

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[ge0dude]

I would stay away from BM for VHS capture.

Mac isn't usually suggested, but I think you can use something from the Matrox MXO2 line with macs. There is a thunderbolt adapter, but if your mac pro is of the right era, and it sounds like it probably is, it should take the pci-e card.

That's a lot cheaper of a route than using the thunderbolt adapter.

For Mac this might be your best/cheapest option, but I'm curious to see what others say. Interesting topic.

[mts1]

Quote:

Originally Posted by gmanrockstar

Hello,
I am curious if a PCIe capture card (in the Mac Pro) would produce better results than a USB capture card? I have been looking at the Blackmagic DeckLink Studio 2 and the Blackmagic Intensity Pro 4K. Similarly, a PCI capture card in the PowerMac G4, if that is even worth consideration.

You can't use "Blackmagic DeckLink Studio 2" alone - there is no analog input video input.
"Blackmagic Intensity Pro 4K" has a serious problem with levels, which can't be properly adjusted. Also the company refuses to fix this problem.
On the other hand "Blackmagic Intensity Pro" (previous incarnation) is good. I use it.

[ge0dude]

I can't seem to find the original post, but LS advised against the original intensity pro (I own one as well) for one reason or another. It might have been something that needed to be adjusted in post or something, but I can't quite remember. But yeah, if you had to use one BM card, that would be the one.

About the TBC: Personally, I would only consider buying one from the marketplace on this forum. Either from LS Directly, or from someone who has pulled it from their collection or used it recently to capture home movies. Not only will you pay more on ebay for a properly working one, but it will also be more of a gamble. Be prepared to drop $1600 or so if/when you choose to get one.

Just a few more thoughts as long as I'm here. XP rigs are great but if you can score a Matrox MXO2 for a decent price and if decent capture software exists for mac (I'm sure you can find something that works) go for it. -However you can get a good XP laptop for $40-80, so it's not necessarily cost-prohibitive.

If you do want the absolute best (which is usually not necessary and might be splitting hairs) you'll want to look for specific ATI All-In-Wonder cards with specific chipsets (rage theater and theater200 I believe) you can pick up anywhere from $30 to $200+, they require proper breakout boxes and/or cables so don't buy one bare unless you've secured the specific input box for that model. These work with Windows XP, of course, and come in AGP, PCI(rare) and Pci-e(more rare, beware of missing adapters especially with these later models.)

But most people seem happy with these "alternative" cards, Aja's and Matrox's and such. Haven't read a complaint. Some of the Aja's might work on mac as well but the breakout boxes alone will put you out of budget compared to a Matrox.

[aramkolt]

The Tevion I think can be used with videoglide on powerPC Macs, but I think it requires you to give up some horizontal resolution with that being 640x480 instead of 720x480. I don't know that I'd trust an older Mac to capture reliably though given the large bitrates involved for a lossless capture.

It is possible to put a AJA Khona LHi/LHe PCIe Card into a thunderbolt expansion box like those made by Sonnet tech echo line and those will work with M series Macs, but this gets pretty expensive and the drivers can be kind of fiddly with the most current MacOS.

A powerful XP-capable tower is pretty inexpensive honestly. While I haven't turned it on recently, I was able to get a couple of stock Dell Optiplex 7010's running XP and that's a quad core i5 that I think I got on ebay for under $60 shipped. Just had to add some hard drives and that was about all of the upgrading it needed. Finding drivers is annoying since it originally shipped with windows 7, but something like that is going to be more than powerful enough to do any sort of analog video capturing in XP even though I'm sure not all of the cores are being used effectively by XP. It does have PCIe slots if you wanted to go the "recommended" AIW Theater200 chip route. AGP variants of the Theater 200 chip containing AIW cards do run cooler, but that severely limits the types of motherboards you can use and you likely will not be able to have USB 3.0 available for file transfers. Fastest way to get files off will always be to just remove your capture drive and directly connect with SATA or a SATA to USB 3 adapter.

While I have all of that stuff, my go-to is still an AJA KiPro that captures directly to SATA drive modules and then the rest of the processing/editing chain can be done with the Hybrid app within M Series MacOS including QTGMC deinterlacing. I mainly like that setup because the AJA KiPro is a standalone capture device, so I don't have to tie up a computer and can move the capture device to whatever machine I'm capturing off of easily which may or may not matter to most people. The main downside to the AJA is that you need a way to get your analog signal to stable SDI or analog component signal (Which is usually via a broadcast TBC). Pairs that I've found work well are the Snell and Wilcox CVR or TBS series (These output SDI) or you could use something like a For.A FA-310 which can output analog component which the KiPro can also accept. The KiPro is also unique in that it'll actually warn you if frame drops are occurring with a message on the screen, but if that happens, it'll usually be right at the beginning of a capture, so you don't really have to babysit it. There's some other quirks like left and right audio tracks are captured as two separate mono tracks, but you can use an FFMPEG script to combine those into one stereo track without re-encoding the video. The KiPro also does do some compression since it's ProRes based, but it generally should be visually lossless if using ProRes422HQ or ProRes422.

If you're curious how the AJA comes out in terms of quality, basically everything on my YouTube channel is captured that way and processed on an M2 Mac. Most of the source material I have posted is U-Matic, but that is technically specced similar to VHS and still composite/S-Video, though it definitely has more ringing baked into the format itself, so try to ignore that part.

Here's probably one my clearer U-Matic captures, but it's mainly going to be limited to how good the original recording was and if there has been any degradation over time. It was literally caked in mold before I cleaned and captured it, so I was quite pleased with the result: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW3GHi_7RFA

[ge0dude]

Quote:

Originally Posted by aramkolt

but that severely limits the types of motherboards you can use and you likely will not be able to have USB 3.0 available for file transfers. Fastest way to get files off will always be to just remove your capture drive and directly connect with SATA or a SATA to USB 3 adapter.

There are a few options for USB 3.0 on agp boards. If you're willing to spring the money for one of the 5-10 or so models of motherboards that have pci-e and support core2duals/core2quads, you can install a pci-e card.

The second option is to install a PCI card from startech.com that supports usb 3.0. These run about $75-80 minimum, so if you're buying all at once, it probably makes more sense to buy one of the agp/pci-e motherboards. Unless you need to buy New (NOS) that is, then anything is fair game.

I have not tested these cards firsthand, but they all have XP drivers.

Here are a list of Core2Dual/PCI-e/AGP motherboards as long as I'm dropping info:
ASRock 4CoreDual-SATA2
ASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA
ASRock 775Dual-VSTA

partially lifted from this thread: https://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/com...-great-xp.html

[aramkolt]

I think the trick with the ASRock boards and them also having a PCIe slot is that only the AGP *OR* the PCIe card slot can be active at once, so I still don't think you can have a USB3 card in the PCIe slot and also use an AIW AGP graphics card, but I could be wrong. I think those slots are really limited to just graphics cards and only one or the other can be active. I actually do have the 4CoreDual-VSTA model and I think that is how I think it worked anyway, though I never directly had a USB3 card to try with it.

[ge0dude]

Quote:

Originally Posted by aramkolt

I think the trick with the ASRock boards and them also having a PCIe slot is that only the AGP *OR* the PCIe card slot can be active at once, so I still don't think you can have a USB3 card in the PCIe slot and also use an AIW AGP graphics card, but I could be wrong. I think those slots are really limited to just graphics cards and only one or the other can be active. I actually do have the 4CoreDual-VSTA model and I think that is how I think it worked anyway, though I never directly had a USB3 card to try with it.

I just want to thank you for this piece of information, it was crucial in dictating how I spend my money. I dug a little more, and as it turns out most, probably ALL AGP board with PCI-e don't allow you to use both at the same time. I have one board thats questionable, and I do have a spare of it in my stash (a foxconn 915 board) -it has AGP, pcie- x1, and pci-e x16.

But I doubt it will work from my research.

Thank you again for the tip Aramkolt. I learn so much when I make a comment, and then you make some sort of polite clarification. I always learn so much. It's happened multiple times. Thanks again.

[aramkolt]

Glad I could help!

I've yet to try an actual AIW Theater200 PCIe card in the Dell Optiplex 7010, but it does seem to run XP quite well, so I suspect it'll work fine with really none of the headaches of AGP motherboards. The downside to those PCIe cards (aside from running hotter) is that they all require uncommon adapter dongles (not the purple domino type ones), but certain variants do have headers that you can directly connect S-Video and composite inputs, so that'll be one of my projects at some point I think.

[MacNB]

@gmanrockstar

I too prefer the Mac environment ...especially for the editing side. Also, I am not a Windows user.

For the capture, I got a collection of Matrox MXO2 analog capture devices.
I have two MXO2 Mini's; one with PCIe Host Interface card (x1) and one with PCI ExpressCard Host Interface.
I also have the larger standard big-brother version of MXO2 (this has a 12-bit ADC as opposed to 10-bit ADC in the Mini's).
Matrox also made Thunderbolt Host Adapter to attach the MXO2's to a Mac Thunderbolt port but I do not have one (yet).
I bought these used items relatively cheap compared to their original purchase price.

The problem was that Matrox screwed their customers and stopped all development of drivers and s/w after Yosemite.
I happened to have a El-Capitan install on my Mac-Pro 5,1 and the Matrox software installed fine.

On the Mac, there's a convoluted method to install ProRes422 codecs that the Matrox capture s/w can use to capture.
I used that codec as the capture format because (a) Huffyuv was not available for Matrox on Mac; (b) is visually lossless; and (c) it great for final editing phase.

But since then, I switched to Windows on a separate PC's for the capture process only.
Now I use VirtualDub to capture in huffyuv.
I have now captured several Hi8 and VHS tapes with MXO2.
Both versions MXO2's (Mini and Standard) had no problems capturing...never dropped any frames from any of the tapes I captured.
In windows, you can also capture directly to ProRes422 with the MXO2.

The Matrox PCI Expresscard host interface card was used on an old Dell Vostro laptop with dual-core T9500 CPU running Windows 7.
Both Matrox s/w and Virtualdub have no issues capturing....again never lost a frame over 90 minutes capture.

The Matrox PCIe Host interface card is used on an old i7-3770K based desktop running Windows 10. This system too captures without fail.

At the moment I do not have TBC but the tapes I have are in a decent state ...recorded but only played a few times.
The cameras I used as players are Sony DCR TRV-320E and DCR TRV-230E for the Hi8 and Video8 tapes.
The VCR is NV-HS950 for the VHS tapes.

After capture, I use Hybrid on a Mac to process the captures and save as Huffyuv (for archive) and ProRes422 for editing.