Now using Canopus ADVC-300 to archive old N-th generation VHS
 

Just sharing my experience...

After trying a few capture cards and Panasonic DMR-ES25 as middleman TBC, I have come to conclusion that ADVC-300 worked the best for me for archiving. The VHS tapes I was going to digitize are not the best quality to begin with. Some of them were recorded from TV cable via RF in LP or EP mode. Others are 4th or 5th generation dubs. I am not planning to be editing footage. At best if I ever watch it, it's going to be full screen VLC player output to the flat screen TV. No further conversion to DVD or Blu-Ray will be done.

The capture cards I tried were Diamond One Touch Video Capture VC500 USB (Conexant chipset based), Diamond ATI Theater HD 750 USB, ATI USB 600 and Canopus ADVC-300.

Putting Panasonic DMR-ES25 as a middleman would trigger Macrovision on the older tapes for all the capture cards. So this was not an option.

When I was doing the direct capture, the strong wavy lines would appear on ATI USB 600 and VC500.

Diamond ATI Theater HD 750 USB and ADVC-300 would give more or less straighten image. ATI HD 750 gave image straighter than that from ADVC-300 plus it was lossless Huffyuv, but the image would jitter at times.

Then I figured that ADVC-300 would give me less headache, would be less time consuming and overall would be good enough. I'm sure if I had put more time, money and effort, I would have ended with better equipment and better quality transfers. But these VHS are not that important to me so as long as the original doesn't really visually differ from the digital copy, I am fine.

Disclaimer: I don't advertise ADVC-300 DV capture over ATI or Conexant Huffyuv capture. I'm just sharing my experience what I've decided to do with older not so important VHS cassettes that I will be throwing into garbage.

would you mind posting samples? would be very helpful to upload samples for comparison.

what did you mean by wavy lines?

I erased all the attempts I made with other capture cards. But I can try to replicate them later when I have time.

I think by what I meant by wavy lines called tearing. http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=161774

I'm actually most interested in the advc300s quality. Could you put up a small unconverted clip?

You want unconverted clip from N-th generation VHS cassette using VC500, ATI 600 USB and ATI 750 HD USB?

Just the 300, but if you have the others that's great too

Sorry, I misread your previous post as "I'm actually NOT interested in the advc300s quality." LOL

Ok, I'll post some in a few days.

thanks. with dv, do you find any macroblocking or is it only color that suffers compared to the other devices?

That's the thing is that so far I don't see any visible artifacts attributed to DV. If you point me out what in particular I should look for (both macroblocking and color), I would really appreciate it. The overall VHS bad quality is attributed to analog Nth generation or LP/EP mode coming from the recording from the TV.

I don't know why analog->DV continues to be debated after years of posts by pros and advanced users recommending otherwise. But, then, why listen to other users:


http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...html#post26594

If you "can't see a difference", suit yourself. DV is PC-only playback. If you want anything else, you'll have to re-encode from a lossy format to another lossy format.

I'm not advocating ADVC-300. As I said, for the not so important material and low quality to begin with and not intended to be re-encoded, it's ok for my needs.

When I capture higher quality and more important to me material, I store it in lossless Huffyuv. LaserDiscs is one example. Commercial VHS and personal Hi8 would be other examples.

And no, I personally don't see the difference. I'm not saying it doesn't exist. I'm saying that so far I don't know what precise artifacts I should look for. I see macroblocking for low bitrate encoded mpeg2 for example.

And by the way, 2 years ago I did post a DV vs Huffyuv image that I digitized from Hi8.

The reply by lordsmurf was Probably not the best comparison shot. It does largely appear identical, due to the source and the scene.

Now my source is much worse than the ones from Hi8. So if Hi8 images were almost identical due to source and scene, I would expect that it would be impossible to identify the visual difference between DV and Huffyuv given the source which is way worse than Hi8.

Additionally, 2 and a half years ago I did post a few screenshots from digitizing LaserDiscs using both ADVC-300 and Philips based capture card. The capture was done from VideoEssentials LaserDisc using both composite and S-Video. The LD player was Pioneer Elite LD-S2.

You've answered your own question, on more than one occasion, and you've seen what others have to say now and earlier. Nothing has changed.

I think its fair to revist some questions. Time and technology change. Many pieces of hardware are unavailible. I've also listened to plenty of advice here and on other forums and gotten some really great results and some really terrible ones. Many questions that have been answered lack detail, so someone looking to do a specific project benefits from revisiting certain questions.

There are a group of people that are in love with the devices. I personally capture uncompressed 720x486, but depending on what you need it for DV might be right.

486? What capture device are you using?

http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/1093119

Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle with Thunderbolt

Welcome back, Leonid! I'm surprised that the DMR-ES25 introduced false Macrovision detection on passthrough. Did you ever try VHS -> DMR-ES25 -> Intensity Shuttle via component?

He is using the advc300, I use a shuttle.

Hello... Thank you...

Yeah, I returned Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle with Thunderbolt.

I did a few captures from LaserDisc player Pioneer Elite LD-S2 composite to Panasonic DMR-ES25 component to Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle with Thunderbolt. The problem with Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle with Thunderbolt is that it drops frames without reporting it. I posted about it here. I do confirm that it is Black Magic which drops the frames and not Panasonic DMR-ES25.

When I finish old VHS transfers, I will resume LaserDisc transfers. I will buy Black Magic Intensity Extreme. Maybe this one will not drop the frames. Of course, I will be doing LaserDisc transfers to Huffyuv only.

By the way, ADVC-300 inserts extra frames here and there. Perhaps it is done to keep audio sync. But I don't care that much due to poor quality video source to begin with.

And by the way... to premiumcapture... I'm certain yours also drops the frames, you just don't know about it because you don't do parallel capture.

Mine is set to report dropped frames, you're saying it does it anyways?

Yes it does. And it doesn't reinsert it, so once the frame is dropped your footage is shorter by 33 milliseconds (for NTSC).

I was using it on MacBookPro with SSHD. Mine also was set to report dropped frames.

But besides the actual time, how did you find out that frames were dropped? Couldn't this just be a delay in starting/ending?

Because I was doing simultaneous capture going from LD-S2 not only to Black Magic but also into VC500 USB stick using VirtualDub on my laptop computer (S-Video to S-Video). And then I would again recapture the whole LD using yet another card ATI HD 750 PCIe on my desktop computer (Windows XP/VirtualDub/Composite). I then would compare the footages. The ones using VC500 and ATI HD 750 PCIe perfectly matched. But the one using Black Magic Intensity Shuttle would be short up to 8 frames. A couple of times it didn't lose any frames. A few times it lost 4 frames and a couple of times it lost 8 frames. Later I did find all the places where Black Magic lost frames. It was some kind of pattern because the distance between missing frames was almost identical. I reinserted the missing frames from VC500 capture.

The footage is usually an hour long or less. It's one side of the LaserDisc.

This is the AVISynth script I was using to convert from MOV to Huffyuv AVI:

clip1 = QTInput("Untitled 01.mov", audio = 1)
clip1 = crop(clip1, 0, 2, -0, -4)
return clip1

If you want to know why in hell I was doing 3 different captures of the same footage, that's another story. :)

Did the missing frames noticeably affect playback (sync/stutter)?

In my case they could because I was taking digital soundtrack directly from optical toss link off of the LD player (not via Black Magic) and then matched with the video manually. Otherwise I wouldn't worry too much.

And by the way, if you have Black Magic Intensity Shuttle with Thunderbolt, why would you be looking into Canopus ADVC-300? Are you using Black Magic with MAC or with PC?

I have a mac and parallels so I can run both. I have read many stories about people being happy with the 300 so I was t to see a capture sample before I officially condemn it as many others have done. There really aren't many new good current options for either OS for analog capture.

A while back I read that Black Magic Intensity Shuttle couldn't digitize VHS on its own unless you put TBC in between (too many dropped frames). Is it so? Can you confirm? I myself haven't tried digitizing VHS using Black Magic Intensity Shuttle. I've only used it to digitize LaserDiscs (with TBC built in to the player). The image quality was great. The only problem was missing frames.

If BM works for you, I wouldn't bother looking back into old technology of Canopus ADVC-300. Plus BM is uncompressed. ADVC only gives you an option to capture in DV. The good thing about Canopus is that it's very stable. You feed the crappy VHS to it and it doesn't choke and it almost never drops frames. The audio sync there is perfect too. I didn't like audio video sync of BM. I was feeding component video and RCA audio into BM. The audio was always ahead of video about 300 milliseconds or so. At the end I was merging digital audio into video anyway and disregarding the audio portion from that of BM. So this didn't matter. But if you pay $227 for the equipment as opposed to $30-$40 (Diamond Multimedia VC500 or Diamond Multimedia ATI 750 HD PCIe), you would expect the expensive equipment to be at least as stable as the cheap one. But it wasn't.

--Leonid

Something people might not know - I hate VHS. It's terrible. Granted, it allowed us to make the advance towards what we have today but better technology was availible before it (Beta). Because I believe its terrible and its quality is terrible, I don't necessarily hate the Canopus. VHS is garbage to begin with. Certainly the quality loss will be noticeable to someone looking for it, but VHS being what it is, I even stretch to use the word quality.

The Intensity doesn't like VHS without a TBC. A built-in TBC on the AG 1980 or a JVC unit will generally suffice unless it has serious damage. I don't believe the intensity itself was built for analog capture - granted it can do it, but the hardware is built for someone capturing uncompressed digital video.

Premiumcapture, what source are you using to begin with? Hi8, VHS or you're not using any analog to begin with? If you're not using any analog source, forget Canopus. You really don't need it.

Just VHS for now. Not plugging in my AVCHD camera to capture to S-Video lol.

I was at a broadcast station on Monday working out details for a Vietnam documentary I will be making for TV. I asked for a tour of the tech and was surprised to find they have stations that take DV tapes and VHS. I was surprised to find their VCR was a JVC V10SU (or close model number), I was expecting a magic machine but VCRs are apparently just VCRs, the key to broadcasting is apparently the encoder they use for everything they air.

So and you need the device to digitize it, right? Have you tried Black Magic Intensity Shuttle with external TBC to digitize the VHS? What devices do you have in mind to use to digitize? Just curious?

Like I mentioned before, with a VCR that has a built-in TBC, the Blackmagic products generally won't drop frames, sometimes at the end where there is whitespace but it won't affect the final recording considering it gets cropped off.

I just ordered a brand new ATI 600, and will be giving that a go when it comes in the mail. The Intensity products seem to work well over HDMI, arguably one of the best HDMI capture devices out there, but for analog, I am thinking there are better suited devices.

The fact that you've ordered ATI 600 is a big mistake. I still don't understand why it is highly recommended here in this forum. Just take a look at this thread:

http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...i-600-usb.html

I have one and it's exactly the same problem. People trash Canopus ADVC-300 for DV which results in bad chroma, but ATI 600 screws chroma up even worse. Yeah, I agree that $20 is better than $400 but still....

If you want to go with a similar device but with the ones that have good chroma, go with http://www.diamondmm.com/vc500-diamo...it-stream.html. This was recommended to me by a member msgohan who is on this forum. I'm sure he can recommend you the proc amp settings. If not, I can try to dig his email to me.

You can get it on newegg http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16815306013 or try to find it on Amazon.

But what I want to know is what exactly you are not happy with when you capture analog video using Black Magic?

As far as I remember I didn't like S-Video image quality from Black Magic. But I have no complaints about component video in.

BTW, I just sent you a private message.

From what I've read, there were several revisions of the ATI 600 card. Most do not have a problem, and mine is fine. It has some quirks (incompatibilities with some hardware setups/workflows), but this is not one of them. Not one that can be repeated, at least.

But again, the ATI AIW is better -- better than ATI 600, much better than ADVC 300 DV boxes.

Hi Lordsmurf,

Do you happen to have spare ATI 600 card that just like yours doesn't have an issue (I will be happy to buy one). Or can you at least point me out to one? The one I have has screwed up chroma.

ATI AIW is AGP or PCI, correct? Unfortunately there's not an option for me since I need to buy a special old computer for that. Unless someone has cheap for sale here.

Also in what way ATI AIW is better than ATI 600? Better color handling? Sharper? In what sense overall?

Thanks.

--Leonid

the later AIW cards are PCI-E

Content is king, followed by complying with the signal standards of the station.
Think back on some of the most compelling lousy image video of recent time. Was the Rodney King tape, or the Weather Channel storm footage.

As a point of slight interest, the old Pinncacle Systems DV500 and Liquid edition 5.5 (?) NLE systems capture was based on an ATI Rage chip-based video card that included an IEEE1394 port and a break-out box for analog I/O (composite, s-video and audio).

Nope, sorry. :depressed:

Or PCI express (PCIe)

Pretty much in every way possible. USB capture devices just do not have the bandwidth abilities of PCI, AGP or PCIe. Not to say the ATI 600 was bad -- it's not. But the ATI AIW cards are easily better.

Interesting. I'd either never heard that, or have long ago forgotten this. (Probably the latter.)

So I finished archiving most of my VHS tapes. Throughout the process I've used 3 different capture devices. I did not use TBC. IMO each device gave best results for its own type of VHS based on its condition.

For horrible quality, unstable, more than 2nd generation VHS Canopus ADVC-300 gave the best results. There was no jitter, no tearing, no blown up whites and no dropped frames. The end result wasn't worse than original when comparing playback with original source on the conventional old school TV.

For the stable, great condition, not worn out VHS tapes LifeView FlyVideo 3000FM gave the best results. No blown up whites and the lines were straight.

Usually if the VHS were a bit used but OK, then Diamond ATI 750 HD USB would give the best result. I didn't notice any AGC problem either.

There were 3 VHS which I captured with all 3 devices.

So here's my conclusion:

1. For good quality VHS tapes Canopus ADVC-300 is not an option. It smoothes out the video even though I unselected all the filters. So the image is not as sharp as on the original VHS. It also inserts extra frames as a pattern around every 5-10 minutes which is OK on the bad VHS (who cares?) but not OK on good VHS.

2. For bad quality VHS both ATI 750 HD USB and LifeView FlyVideo 3000FM are not good. It looks like ATI 750HD USB has built-in TBC but it may result in a lot of jitter, in potential AGC problems, blown up whites and a few dropped frames here and there. LifeView FlyVideo may result in a lot more dropped frames and tearing at the top of the picture.

3. Interesting that on some good VHS ATI 750 HD USB and LifeView FlyVideo 3000FM performed almost identically well. On some other good VHS ATI 750 HD USB performed incredibly well whereas LifeView had a lot of tearing at the top and some dropped frames. On the 3rd set of good stable VHS LifeView FlyVideo 3000FM performed incredibly well (stable and getting all the colors right) whereas ATI 750 HD USB would have blown up whites here and there and wouldn't capture colors accurately.