Capturing Hi8 using Hauppage USB-Live2?

[olav-hi8]

Dear all,

I’ve recently got my hands on a Sony CCD-TR2000E camera with replaced capacitors and cleaned sensors (done by the previous owner). I’ve started shooting some footage, which went great, and I’m already very happy with the results. When looking at the footage through the viewfinder or hooking the camera up to my TV using component cables, the images are nice and clear, with no jitter or flickering whatsoever.

Now comes the digitizing part, where I’ve run into problems. For ease of use, and because my PC has no FireWire port, I decided to opt for a USB capture card. After doing some research, I bought the Hauppauge USB-Live2 because the I-O Data GV-USB2 couldn’t easily be delivered to me. In terms of software, I decided to use AmaRecTV and the Lagarith codec for “lossless” capture.

The problem is that the capture quality is quite bad, to say the least. There is a lot of light flickering, and the image quality is far worse compared to connecting the camera directly to my TV. When I use an S-Video cable, which should provide higher quality and is preferred, there is even more noise: there's more horizontal 'blurryness' as well. I've attached some example videos so you can see the results of the capture with both the component- as the s-video cable

Google drive links to the videos:

• Component: https://drive.google.com/file/d/14H0...ew?usp=sharing
• S-video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AIq...ew?usp=sharing

What I’ve already tried:

1. Bought a new gold-plated S-Video cable
2. Used two different Fuji MP P5-90 film tapes, one of them brand new. Both show the same behavior: excellent quality when played on the TV (component), but terrible quality on the PC via the capture card (both component and S-Video)
3. Followed the “correct” setup in AmaRecTV: FPS, aspect ratio, deinterlacing, codec, etc.
4. Tried the Hauppauge capture software that comes with the card, OBS Studio with various settings, and VirtualDub. In all cases, the same flickering and poor quality remain, the same that can be seen in the attached videos

Any help is welcome! If the cause is unknown, I’d be happy to try a different capture method, any advice is appreciated.

Kind regards,
Olav-Hi8

[vwestlife]

Does your camcorder have a button or option in the menu for a Time Base Corrector (TBC)? If so, make sure it's enabled. The wobbly footage you're getting is due to the lack of a TBC.

[fafeco]

Apart from the lack of TBC as vwestlife already told you, which is the main problem in the video you uploaded, the S-Video capture has actually more detail than the composite one, as the attached snaps show; notice the additional detail in the tomato sauce jar label, the clearer division between both electrical outlets faceplates behind the olive oil bottle, etc. The image grain is the expected on a typical low-light indoors recording with such cameras.

Composite capture:
vlcsnap-component-amarec(20260105-1109).png
S-Video capture:

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The lower grain in the composite capture is due to the lower bandwidth of the video when crammed through this interface; if the grain bothers you, you can surely do a better job at filtering it without losing real detail with composite video, so to preserve the highest source quality, capture with S-Video. Once you have solved the TBC issue, make sure you are capturing with the appropriate video levels on your capture device. Both the composite and s-video capture show clipped whites as shown in the next image in the histogram (outlets' faceplates). You will find more details about levels adjustment in any VirtualDub capture tutorial.

vlcsnap-s-video-amarec(20260105-1108).png

However, there is an additional problem as you have got voids in the histogram (dark vertical lines in the histogram), which are related to limitations in the proc-amp built into your capture device (more information in this thread). I do not have any experience with your capture device, but I can tell you I don't have this problem with an ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500DV.
Here is the avisynth code I used to display the histogram in Virtualdub, if you want to have a try with it just copy the code into notepad and save it as "histogram_test.avs" file, and drag and drop it into VirtualDub.

AVISource("component-amarec(20260105-1109).avi")

ConvertToYV16(interlaced=true)
Crop(20,20,-20,-20)
Levels(20, 1.2, 240, 0, 255, dither=true)
Histogram()