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  #1  
03-24-2018, 03:31 AM
woodepgh woodepgh is offline
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I would appreciate some advice on improving my captures of VHS/S-VHS tapes using Premiere Pro 2018. During the capture, the Premiere Pro preview screen shows a fairly decent quality video stream, but when I review the captured footage - which apparently defaults to a Quicktime file - it is much softer than the original. I had assumed that the capture was a lossless process - especially considering the large file size (about 225MB per minute of video), but apparently not, and I can't find an option to change the capture format. I am passing the stream through a Panasonic PV-GS250 Mini DV camcorder from either a JVC HR-S8000u or a JVC HR-S5000u VCR, and into my iMac via Thunderbolt. I really don't think that the process from the VCRs to the iMac is the issue, as the video that is being captured and displayed real time on my iMac screen is fairly clean and crisp (for a VCR), but it is the actual captured file that is substandard. I tried a capture with iMovie, and it seems slightly better, but it could be my imagination. Thanks in advance for your thoughts and suggestions.
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  #2  
03-25-2018, 07:50 AM
dpalomaki dpalomaki is offline
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Some observations.

Capture via firewire from a DV recording is lossless relative to the recording. The recorded bits in DV format are an accurate copy of what is read off the tape, including any uncorrested tape read errors.

However, conversion from analog formats such as VHS to DV is not lossless because DV (as in MiniDV camcorder) recording format is not a lossless format. DV camcorders files do intraframe compression and run about 2 GB per 9 minutes of video, as you have observed.

VHS is not very high resolution, arguably around 320hx480v for the B&W portion and much less for the color portion of the image at best, but on a small preview screen it can look OK. (S-VHS is better in the horizontal B&W portion.) When viewed on a large screen it will look bad compared to the HD we have become used to. Further, noise in the image, as is common in many home recordings, makes matters worse because it robs bits from the compression process - noise consumes bits would better be used for scene detail. MiniDV camcorders with pass through A/D capability can work for "quick and dirty" captures, but are not a good solution for serious VHS conversion work.

You will read in many other posts here that MAC is not a good platform for capture and restoration of analog video and that the DV format is not a great format for restoration of video because it is lossy and and uses a compressed color space.

The approach to take will depend on you ultimate end goal for the digitized video, and include factors such as your budget, the number of tapes you want to convert, their condition, how much (if any) restoration of the images is desired, the amount of time your personal time you can invest in the process, and any deadlines you are facing. The experts here can give you advice on the process to optimally capture and restore video on your S-/VHS tapes.
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  #3  
03-25-2018, 09:59 AM
sanlyn sanlyn is offline
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Mac provides no means of lossless capture, the closest thing being ProRes for .mov files.When you encode to lossy DV, you lose, and the lost can't be recovered from lossy compressors. Mac is a poor choice for video restoration, and so is Premiere (it's an editor, not a makeover app). Mac users will have to advise on how you can somehow get high quality with what you're doing, but you're fighting a losing battle working with lossy codecs if you want the best quality from your source.
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03-25-2018, 12:43 PM
hodgey hodgey is offline
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As the analog video, and subsequently the DV format is interlaced, and uses non-square pixels, how it's displayed on a modern square pixel progressive scan LCD display is going to depend on how application handles deinterlacing. I don't know about iMovie, but premiere doesn't give you much control over it. Ideally you will want the raw capture of the DV stream rather than a pre-filtered and transcoded version for further processing. With older versions of iMovie you find find the raw captured .dv files for a project after capture in the Movies folder somewhere, not sure about never versions. I've tried to capture dv with premiere once, but it made program too unstable to be usable so I don't know if anything similar is possible.
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  #5  
03-25-2018, 08:32 PM
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lordsmurf lordsmurf is offline
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I really have nothing to add here.

When you say "improving the capture", do you mean the video quality, or just the capture quality? Capturing quality, ignoring source video quality, is mostly about the device, capturing software, and captured codecs.

- DV has color compression, and makes video look worse than the source.
- Premiere is awful at anything but pure editing; it's an NLE.
- iMovie is better, but not by much.

I've captured on Mac before, with a DataVideo DV device, using Final Cut Pro, to ProRes422. It was for very special situations, with source that was studio-grade flawless (as much as could be). The Windows setup still beat it, easily. Better capture software, codecs, and hardware. No contest. Even a Linux desktop would do better.

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03-26-2018, 12:16 PM
juhok juhok is offline
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UT Video Codec works with macos. Should work with Premiere too.

https://www.videohelp.com/software/Ut-Video-Codec-Suite

VHS is shit and Prores(with one of it's many quality levels) should work just fine. I've tested many times what difference does high bitrate lossy source make compared to lossless one by feeding the different versions to the same process and I'm hard pressed to find a little difference in the luminance of a few pixels in the end result.
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03-27-2018, 04:30 PM
sanlyn sanlyn is offline
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Lossless capture was never intended for those who can't see the difference in post-processing and final output. Use whatever you want.
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03-27-2018, 04:33 PM
juhok juhok is offline
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It's not a matter "can't see" but "it's not there". I do lossless too, why not. But there's no reason to paint Prores for VHS as some kind of a catastrophe.
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03-27-2018, 05:01 PM
dpalomaki dpalomaki is offline
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Lossless vs. lossy
8-bit vs. 10-bit.

It is all about cumulative errors introduced in multiple processing steps, both A/D and D/A conversions and filters, and compression. A very simple example., with analog a value can be 8, or 7, or 7.4, or what ever in between. With digital it is either 8 or 7, but not in between.

As a very simple example, say the analog input is 7.51, we A/D it and it becomes 8 and then double it with a filter and it becomes 16. Then we D/A it and we have an output of 16. But if we double the original analog it becomes 15.02, not the same. Whether or not this difference is important will depend on the ultimate use and display of the processed video.

Bottom line is to be aware of what compromises one may be making and do what works for for the project at hand.

Compression schemes, bit depths, and bandwidth standards were set to provide images that were acceptable to most people in the target markets using available technologies. VHS looked pretty good as long as we were using typical SD CRT TV sets under 27" and seated far enough away so we couldn't see the shadow mask or raster lines on the tube. The advent of the various forms of HD and sitting at arms length from a large screen monitor has sure spoiled all of us.
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03-27-2018, 05:07 PM
hodgey hodgey is offline
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Prores is in a sense the modern version of the DV or MJPEG formats. Prores uses the same type of lossy compression (DCT) as JPEG and DV (and by extension the earlier mpeg-formats),so it will have similar blocking and ringing artifacts if compressed too much. Though, as it's 4:2:2 or better chroma subsampling, you won't be throwing away as much colour information as with DV. That said, it is more geared towards clean digitally recorded HD content than noisy VHS content.

The lossless part which is similar to the advanced algorithms used by h264/h265 is what allows it to do compress better without throwing away as much information.
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  #11  
03-27-2018, 06:04 PM
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lordsmurf lordsmurf is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by sanlyn View Post
Lossless capture was never intended for those who can't see the difference in post-processing and final output.
Quote:
Originally Posted by juhok View Post
there's no reason to paint Prores for VHS as some kind of a catastrophe.
Quote:
Originally Posted by dpalomaki View Post
Lossless vs. lossy
8-bit vs. 10-bit.
Quote:
Originally Posted by hodgey View Post
it is more geared towards clean digitally recorded HD content than noisy VHS content.
similar to the advanced algorithms used by h264/h265 is what allows it to do compress better without throwing away as much information.
The quoted is all true.

- Lossless was indeed not created for those that consider Youtube (pre-720/1080 even!), Xvid, and other low quality to be "DVD quality" (which is amusing since DVD itself is not the measuring stick of quality). Non-MPEG, non-crap compression was made for the content producers, yet learned by those converting their old memories to DVD/digital.

- ProRes422 is a more modern codec scheme, 10+ years, a decade, newer than those old lossless/MPEG/DV/etc compressions. Everything from 10-bit vs 8-bit (to allow for more rounding errors), to non-blocking. However, it was also designed with clean HD camera sources in mind, not converted SD consumer analog. It should still look excellent, but lossless preferred.

I was using ProRes422 daily about 9 years ago. It was still new at the time.

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