VHS capturing: what do I need to own and know?
 

I currently have one Panasonic NV-HV60, one BlackMagic Intensity Shuttle, one camcorder (Canon MV700i), one firewire cable, and one firewire port. I've been capturing with the red/white/yellow cables out to the camcorder, firewire out of the camcorder into my desktop PC, and then Windows Movie Maker to actually do the capturing.

Which is...not the recommended process. I've tried VirtualDub but never managed to get it to work, although I can't recall why.

I've found a JVC SR-S388E on eBay, but the photo of it shows a giant dent in the top, which is disconcerting. It also has no manual. On the other hand...I'm in Australia. Tapes are PAL. The vast majority of VCRs available are NTSC.

The SR-S388E is the only one on the Buying Guide that I can find on eBay (that will ship to Australia and isn't well over $2000). Is there anywhere else I should be looking? I don't mind letting go of a few hundred Australian dollars, but two grand is just not an option and that one's a Panasonic, which I hear aren't quite as good anyway.

I'm also figuring I'll need an AVT-8710, given the TBC-1000 no longer seems to be available anywhere (other than a 'for parts' one on eBay).

Would going through the BlackMagic and capturing as MJPEG be the way to go, or should I stick with the camcorder-and-firewire option? Anything I've missed?

A Pana NV HV61 and the USB3 shuttle I have here
Even the JVC SR-388

The menu settings can be read in the manual on page. 8
The PDF can be purchased [47 pages]

Always several recorder / feeder try
2 recorder is not enough there.

Capturing in DV-AVI = no ... not a good idea

AVT-8710 and also the Datavideo TBC 1000 I have here.

you can still buy
...patience
---------------------------

no of course not

VDub with Lagarith YUY2 [4: 2: 2]
---------------------------
https://www.linkedin.com/in/antonsvideo

http://www.videoproductions.com.au/h...downscale.html

he is the professional in Australia

He is also in the German Canopus forum and writes in German

I have neither the budget nor the need to go absolutely nuts with VCRs. I'm not doing this for a living.

Running it through the Firewire cable converts it to DV, right? So I'd have to get it from the VCR to the computer some other way?

The AVT-8710 is still available new, as far as I can tell, but I can't find a TBC-1000 available anywhere. I did see a TBC-5000 somewhere, but it was $800 or something like that.

Anton Strauss writes but as digitizing analog material.

Or here is my idea

JVC SR-388 ---> Pana EH65 DMR [Front in]
EH65 Back Scart out with S-Video + Audio -----> Shuttle
Capture with VDub in Lagarith

Really can't afford an EH65. VDub doesn't recognise the Intensity Shuttle, so that's not an option anyway.

it can also be a DMR EH 595 or EH585 or EH575.

The cost occasion the 50 AUD [Australian dollar]

The HV60 can spend no clean time constant signal
Give it himself.

The JVC SR-388 has a TBC [left behind the flap]
but that's just a line TBC and not for the entire image

Tomorrow I'm the JVC SR-388 pick times from the magazine.

How to properly analog capturt is here very much to read
of people who can read and write English.
I can only my translation swiss dialect ---> German ---> english
sometimes I have to laugh because of the errors.

Honestly ... I myself have a DMR EH65 in the cutting room.

You forget.......
You need then for the capture is a video editing program.
Edius Grass Valley is a good idea

by the end of 2016.
Trial
Previously, the demo only 31 days.

Regardless, plugging those into the BlackMagic won't let me capture lossless. If I'm going to have to buy new equipment to stick between my computer and the VCR, I'd rather it be something that'll co-operate with VirtualDub.

I don't understand this.

I'm aware, that's why I'm also figuring on getting an AVT-8710.

I don't even want to know how much that costs.

I have Adobe Creative Suite, so in terms of editing I'm all good. It's just the capturing I need to sort.

Most members in forums like this don't do it for a living, either. We take our cues from the pros who do. If your budget is that tight, how did you end up with Black Magic? Better capture devices for analog video don't cost that much. But if you're sold on BM, I guess you have to work with it.

We don't recommend analog tape to DV. But, yes, there are DV capture devices. I don't use them. People who use analog to DV can advise further.

Yikes! Out of my salary grade. I've used my AVT-8710 for 12 years now when it's needed.

I invested in the BlackMagic and DoStudio for HD capturing and Blu-Ray authoring, not for anything to do with VHS. I just listed it as a thing I have that might be an option, I'm not "sold on" it for analog work.

I did this relatively recently. It was expensive. Therefore, I can't really splash cash around right now. One good VCR should do, at least for a while. If there are any tapes that cause a particular issue with that machine I can look at it further, but I see no sense in immediately grabbing multiple machines. Particularly when I've only found one machine available.

You misunderstand. I was saying I have a firewire cable from my camcorder to my PC at the moment. Which, from my understanding, converts the tape to DV before it gets to the PC, meaning lossless capture isn't an option, and therefore to capture losslessly I'd need something else.

I studied this space for several months and decided to let the experts do the 100 VHC tapes I have of my son and family who are no more. I still believe the digitalfaq folks have unique skills and experience. If you only have a set amount of legacy media that you want to convert it could be less expensive to let them do it. I have tried some other methods and its all about the quality of your original analog media when it comes to the cheaper methods. Sorry this is so non-technical, just an impression from one optimistic customer.

I've just come across a Philips VR 1000 and a Philips VR 1100 on eBay as well. They seem better taken care of than the JVC unit.

Any input?

are both good Recorder
partially JVC Clone
I have here the 1000/1100 + 1500

lord smurf wrote
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...00-1600-a.html

Any suggestion as to which of the two is better?

Philips VR 1000 plays tape A from better
Band B plays the VR1100 from better quality.

you have to play each band capture, and then compare the resultat.

I would buy both again

Both are good, and any differences are just nitpicking in most cases.

The major issue is that tapes can react differently to different decks, so it takes a lot of experience to see when decks are truly "better". For example, the JVC 9500-9900 vs. the 9911/SR/7600+ lines. And even then, the 9600 usually acts best. I like the 9800s, however, due to my sources.

The only difference between the listed features is that the 1100 doesn't list a TBC or the ability to play EP tapes.

On the other hand, the front of the 1100 clearly says "Time Base Corrector", so.

At least with the JVC the manual is available on here and I was able to read it, but the two Philips units don't have manuals indexed.

Manual page 25 TBC, see Appendix

EP bands I have not here

otherwise I agree lord smurf to
the young has almost always right

Alright, I've picked up the VR-1000. I'll grab an AVT-8710 as well...then what?

This sort of thing seems to be the recommendation in terms of getting the footage onto the PC. Any good/bad versions I should be looking out for? The other thing I notice is that that one doesn't ship to Australia.

Some factors to consider if you are not going to do this for a living, and the budget for gear (and/or time) is limited.

For a moderate number of tapes paying to have it done can be faster and lower net cost. And less time required to learn the tricks of video capture, restoration, and editing.

Decide how good is "good enough" for your purposes. Each of us has different thresholds for unsatisfactory and perfection. What is good enough for Tom may be unsatisfactory to Dick, and overkill for Harry. In general, the higher the quality, the more time and investment required.

VHS gear is generally old now, and the professional and commercial gear is often beat to death. The consumer gear was often cheap quality, especially toward the end of the VHS era, and may have been abused. Gear sourced from the used auction market (e.g., eBay) is often a risk - there is no reliable way to know its condition without hands on, and obtaining parts and repair services is generally problematic at this point in time.

The capture gear favored here is out of production, and not supported with drivers on current computers (e.g., Win 7/8/10). You will likely need a W2K or XP machine.

Capturing to DV AVI files is not a good choice if you plan to do serious restoration work. But if all you intend to do with the capture material is some simple editing and then author to DVD or other SD media it may meet your needs.

Since you have the BM Intensity gear already, give it a try to determine whether or not you are satisfied with the results.

Anyone know anything about this? More expensive than the AVT-8710, but I got mine and it's faulty, which seems to be happening a lot. And it's still cheaper than a TBC-5000, and has the proc amp controls.

I picked up a USB-Live2 on the advice of someone at VH, and that's co-operating with VDub and the new Philips deck, as well as my new Windows 10 laptop.

The TVOne and AVToolbox TBCs are using the same chips. The 8710 and 1T-TBC both have issues, as do all Cypress products. TVOne and AVT are actually just Cypress rebadges from Taiwan.

I've not listed them in the marketplace yet, but I have
- DataVideo TBC-100 PCI card (rare!), new in original box, for $485
- AVT-8710 green version, tested and known to work flawlessly, new in original box, for $300

US dollars? I'd be happy to take the AVT at that price, rather than keep gambling with B&H. Still has the different power connectors for different countries?

USD, yes. And I'll need to calculate shipping. PM me your address.

Done. Just got confirmation I've successfully canceled my reorder, too.

Well, finally managed to get my hands on all the equipment, so: capturing samples.

Original is just the video as-is. ProcAmp used the ProcAmp settings for the USB-Live2 to try and get the blacks more black. Not sure whether it's better to do it that way or do it in VirtualDub or AviSynth later?

The color is really off, mostly due to the chroma offset and blooming hue. But it's fixable.
I'm on the wrong computer right now, so can't do anything right now.

Yeah, I'm planning on running it through VDub/AviSynth. Just want to get the capturing process right first. This tape was actually chosen specifically because it looks awful.

Yeah, rather awful, but I've hassled with some of them myself, and worse.

You're on the right track. But note that by not cropping borders with Virtualdub capture's Crop window the black borders are throwing off your histograms. I made some frame caps to illustrate this (the pics are slightly reduced in size to keep from stretching the panel display too wide).

Below is a cap of Original.avi frame 44 with the borders intact and a YUV histogram at the right. Most of the dark data in the upper white luma band shows that usable darki data is up around RGB 60. No hard clipping there, just a smooth rolloff which is what you want. The frame does have a lot of darks surrounding the bright arena so you can expect the histogram to have a little mountain in the dark area. At the far left of the histogram you can see smaller, separate peaks that represent the black borders. Brights are slightly into the unsafe area, but that can be recovered later.
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...1&d=1466690452

Using the capture app's Crop dialog and removing borders from the input, you can see that the histogram shows elevated blacks. That's not a disaster -- at least darks aren't hard clipped and unrecoverable.
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...1&d=1466690568

Considering the original tape doesn't have much sharp detail in the dark grandstands (VHS has really crummy shadow rendering, even with a better original), you could allow that left hand end of data rolloff lie closer to the left side and avoid some work. Even at that, you'd still have tweak the darks later to get what you can out of them. The temptation is to try to make natural darks look fully lighteded, which doesn't work.

Below, a frame from ProcAmp.avi, which has almost an identical YUV histogram but at least the blacks are a little blacker, if still elevated. I adjusted levels in YUV (Avisynth) and tweaked a little more in VirtualDub with a very slight gradation curve hump at about RGB 40, and brought darker stuff down to RGB 16, since there's nothing down there anyway and it's noisy. Earlier in YUV I also reduced red saturation, which caused an unnatural red glow in the original.

In Avisynth YUY2 the borders were cropped, then AddBorders added black pixels to the edges, centering the image, and resulting a 704x576 frame. That frame size is perfectly acceptable for 4:3 video, but you can leave an extra 8 pixels in place on each side for 720x576. If you had not raised darks beforehand, you'd have hard clipping and zero detail in the dark grandstand. My adjustments were quickies -- you can adjust to suit your purpose. (Note that images like this show up brighter in media players and TV than in web browsers.)
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...1&d=1466691162

The code I used to fix up those borders for a 704x576 frame with no image resizing):

For a 720x576 frame, just keep the extra pixels on the sides:

Be careful, though: if the video is 16:9 DAR, use 720x576. This was done in YUY2. It won't work properly in YV12 with interlaced video which requires that cropping height must be done in groups of 4 pixels. Look at the table of allowed values near the bottom of this page: http://avisynth.nl/index.php/Crop.

Yeah, I just threw this together really quickly in VirtualDub:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/imag...6/iYfTOh-1.png

Didn't know the thing about cropping restrictions, so I just went with what looked good (6 & 28 X, 12 & 10 Y). Not sure how much that'll affect it, or what colour format it's actually in.

It's PAL, not NTSC, too, so it should end up at 576 pixels high.

Not sure what happened with the whites? I had an AVS set up just to load it (via GraphEdit, before capturing) and add a Histogram over the top, and checked through a bit of the tape and all the whites were in the safe zone.

Levels adjustments were made in VirtualDub using the ColorTools Wave Form Monitor, so between that and the AviSynth Histogram (which is also a wave form monitor, in reality) the borders were fairly easy to identify and ignore for the purposes of adjustments.

My previous experience watching that footage was from a simple DVD-recorder capture, over which even my quick adjustments are a massive improvement:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/imag...6/hrZtX8-1.png

Which does make it a bit hard to see any flaws there might be in what I've done, because it's definitely a lot closer to where it should be than the previous version.

Yep. Corrected that while you were reading the post.

Well, I see how I missed that unsafe white:
Attachment 6292

It's more of a problem elsewhere in the video, though:
Attachment 6293

There's a standard video introduction, which is completely different in terms of quality to the actual game, thus that happening. How do I get those whites down?

As you've seen, "Bright" or brightness controls black level. Contrast controls white level. The two controls interact somewhat. Contrast adjusts white levels mostly but has some visible effect on black levels. The converse is true: brightness adjusts black levels mostly but has a slight effect on brights. Thus, lowering contrast lowers brights but affects the lower end somewhat, so you have to jockey back and forth to make everything fit. But it's not as difficult as it sounds. You get the hang of it quickly.

The same action holds true for most editor brighgtness/contrast controls. Unless you're working with specialized filters that let you enable automatic compensation during certain adjustments (such as ColorFinesse and a few others), you tweak black and bright adjustments together manually.

YUV luminance is expanded at both ends when converted to RGB. Thus, if you have blacks at Y=16 in YUV, when converted to RGB the blacks will be closer to RGB=0. Brights are expanded as well. So if you have the bright end overflowing the safe zone to any great extent in YUV, much of it will be clipped in RGB. Once RGB clips out-of-spec YUV values, it's too late to retrieve clipped detail. This is why most users check the YUV spectrum first in something like Avisynth before opening a video directly in editors that work in RGB. Some advanced NLE's like Vegas Pro, Premiere Pro, After Effects, and even the color filters in TMPGEnc Mastering Works, allow working in YUV as well as RGB.

Yeah, I had it figured out with the AVT/internal proc amp controls. Just not sure what the best method is in VDub? I can use Levels to make whites whiter and blacks blacker, just not sure how to do the opposite.

Spent a bit of time with it, came up with this:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...ginal_game.avi
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...tored_game.avi

Dropbox links because it exceeds the attachment size. Thoughts? I've basically just been following this.

Both of your links give 404 errors (page not found)

The VDub Levels filter acts like similar controls in many NLE's. Be careful with raising brights, it can blow out highlights and upper midtones if you're not careful. Vdub has a builtin Contrast/Brightness controls, but like all such controls it's limited and is usually not used. There are better filters with more specific adjustments.

Attached are 4 VirtualDub filters, 2 for levels/colors, 1 for hue/saturation/intensity, 1 for denoising. Docs included. All have been posted earlier .

[EDIT] I just noticed that the webiste of the author of ColorMill has taken to showing popup ads to help pay for his work. That's a shame. Attached is a folder with an offline copy of the website and graphics. It's the web page only, no ads. It opened correctly in Firefox and IE8.

The restoration is still uploading to Dropbox. The same was probably true of the original when you tried it, thus the error. Somehow I forgot to think about that. 14 minutes remaining on the restoration as of posting this.

As I said earlier, I've been using the ColorTools Wave Form Monitor to make my levels adjustments (EDIT: and haven't touched the brights, as it's obviously not necessary with how bright this footage is to begin with). I've also used the hue/sat/int plugin you linked to. I do have the other three plugins (I downloaded the lordsmurf VirtualDub in the stickied thread), but haven't used them as yet. I think I opened Color Mill and promptly got lost.

All you do with ColorMill is click on a category, move sliders up and down, and watch the results in its preview. Otherwise, can't help you there.

http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...1&d=1466791507

Yeah, there's a limit of 20GB or 100,000 downloads a day.

Which I can pretty much guarantee wasn't reached with two 200MB files.

*sigh*

I'll try again with smaller files I can attach.

Downloaded OK, thanks. Better to have samples in the forum anyway than losing them later at download sites.

It's the dinner hour here in North Carolina, so I must stop now and feed the wife. Will look over the samples tonight. Thank you for your efforts.

Having reopened it, I guess it's just an initially overwhelming number of options. Apart from that, though, not sure what the 'stick' and 'lock' buttons do.