TBC in JVC HR-S7600U not good enough?
 

Hello all. First off I want to thank the good people of these forums for all the useful information they've supplied.

I have a JVC HR-S7600U S-VHS deck that I'm using to convert vhses to digital.
Right now my setup is: JVC Deck - S-Video cable - BlackMagic Intensity Pro - Blackmagic Media Express

For I want to say 4/5 tapes I send through I have no problems with dropped frames which is exactly what I'm looking for, but for the other 1/5 of the tapes I can't go more than a few minutes without a few dropped frames. With the Blackmagic this means a few seconds of black.
Interestingly this seems to happen more often with NOS promo tapes. Not sure if theres a connection there.
Would I benefit from another external TBC or should I just keep doing multiple takes and fix it in post?

EDIT: I also do have a DVDO VP30 scaler that I'm trying to get working with my Blackmagic, but I believe I keep running into HDCP issues.

A frame TBC should help. BM products tends to be unforgiving of time base errors, although the Pro 4K may be a bit more forgiving than the Pro. With the external TBC where you were dropping frames you might see some repeated frames.

Forgive my ignorance, but what are "NOS promo" tapes?

Since the 1990s all capture and/or copy products (both analog and digital sources) sold in the USA are required to respect copy protection.

Thanks for the quick response!
I live in the SF Bay Area and worked in surplus electronics for years. I've collected several "new old stock" promotional or in house tapes from places like Apple, Sun, Sega etc.

Repeated frames would be better to work with over several seconds of black video. I'll look into a TBC for sure. Do you have any reccomendations?

We and other forums have advised against BM products for years for analog capture. We have two recent threads that demonstrate the weird videos people get from using them. External tbc's won't solve all their analog source problems, especially the way they misinterpret analog waveform variations and input levels. BM is designed for pristine digital sources, not for VHS.

It may be doable to use this and capture from the HDMI output (granted you want to disable any scaling if possible), it should be possible to disable HDCP on the output according to the manual. Don't know what it will do if encountering macrovision on the inputs though.

Thank you both for the advice. The reason I have a Blackmagic device to begin with is because I'm working on a homemade telecine for my 8mm and 16mm films.

I ended up figuring out why my DVDO VP30 wasn't working with the Blackmagic. Apparently it outputs at 59.94 frames instead of 60 despite saying it does 60, which was why I was getting nothing in the video software. I do have the de-interlace card installed on my VP30 for retro gaming and it works perfectly scaling the VHS to 1080p without any skipped frames.

For reference if anyone is in a similar situation the setup is:
JVC HR-S7600U S-VHS deck -> S-Video -> DVDO VP30 with ABT-102 card -> HDMI -> Blackmagic Intensity Pro -> Blackmagic Media Express.

It just gets worse and worse and uglier and uglier out there. Funny, how the BM crowd never posts evaluation samples except on BoobToob or otherwise grossly re-encoded. You'd think that with all the pricey gear they'd find out what they're doing and get better results. It's all mighty predictable and unimpressive.