Don't put that tape into your precious JVC!!!
A tape in that bad shape can ruin your heads faster than you can imagine. Just throw it to the bin. Not much you can do with it. You can cut out the bad sections and try to recover some footage but... it's very time consuming.
Cheers.

Other hopeless options you can try if your VCR is equipped with Dynamic Drum, Play the tape in 2x mode and slow it down in software no audio will be played though but this is just for the bad sections, Also try -1x and reverse in software. Dynamic Drum doesn't rely on sync signal it just analyses the RF signal from the head and looks for the strongest signal while adjusting its angle.

I would cut the section in the last picture, It would definitely ruin your VCR heads or knock the alignment of your VCR off.

I understood.

Something I saw and I want to know :
There's some good sections, but it's like my JVC or the TBC can't recover the information. The picture is shaking and it's like there's not enough memory.
The shaking is up and down and it's slow, I lose the fluidity of the movement.

It's like the JVC is not enough powerful to recover the bad signal.

A TBC from a lab can correct something like that ?

I know the TBC in the JVC decks has can some times cause this horrible up and down jittering (and some times insert extra frames with partial video from more than one field) if the signal is very bad in the vertical sync area, at least on the PAL ones. As mentioned earlier, a Panasonic DMR-ES10 DVD recorder may help recover more video in those cases, but it really depends on the tape (The European/PAL version also supports NTSC so you don't need a US one).

I am not familiar with the Vortex TBC (is it this one?), what hardware it uses and how it compares to the Cypress and Datavideo units that are commonly used for VHS capture.

The video signal has vertical sync pulses which indicates where a frame starts. If this area is very damaged the digitizing chip will have trouble knowing where the frame starts. A capture dongle may just give up and assume no signal. In a solid TBC unit, the digitizer may try to approximate it instead and digitize whatever it sees coming in, but this may end up with the image jumping or rolling as the start point won't be locked to the video signal.

Of course if the tracking signal on the tape can't be read properly things may be even worse as the video heads won't be locked to the recorded tape signal and as such not line up with the tracks on the tape which means losing even more of the video. You can only recover what the video heads actually manage to read.

Yes this is the one.
My dream would be to get a Datavideo but I can't spend 1000 bucks.
And I can't go back to 2011...

It's crazy to see how worse is the market with the time... every price goes up : vhs, vinyl record...

In rare cases, "no TBC" is the best TBC. :wink2:

I see it. Not often, but it happens.
I have some really good samples of this phenomena, need to upload those sometime.

I did a comparison, and EDIT seems sharper... so I have to retry again !

Some of you said : use a full size shell
Why it's better ?

Only better if you have a crappy plastic adapter, I actually prefer my JVC adapter that has a very smooth rotating metal tape guide rollers, better than the average full size cassette shell.

The VHS-C is more fragile, thinner plastic parts, more easy to jam up. I generally hate the format, those can give you a lot of grief, and I see far more untrackable VHS-C than VHS.

It's good to know, thanks.

For VHS-C tapes, I usually prefer to use a S-VHS camera instead of an adapter. Those adapters tend to mesh with the tension and sometimes they end up breaking gears on your VCR (CP-6 included)... I only trust my adapter from Hama (fully manual). It's as robust as the CP-6, if not more, and more reliable if you ask me... But again, I wouldn't spend any of my time with such a bad tape. You're playing the Russian roulette playing back that tape on your high end JVC. Either ship it to someone who specializes on restoring video from damaged media or throw it to the bin. It just depends on how valuable the tape is for you...

Edit: Even splicing the tape is dangerous if you don't know how to do it. A bad splice could be as bad for your heads as a tape in that condition. Don't just use regular scotch tape. Buy the right thing.

Do I need to take it from the US to be sure it's a NTSC system ??

The PAL Panasonic DMR units support NTSC. The North American models are NTSC-only.

User testing on the German Gleitz forum and here indicates that the PAL DMR-ES10 TBC is significantly stronger than the PAL DMR-ES15 -- for PAL content. This is backed up by the fact that they use a different video processing chip: https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Co.../page/2#656358

For NTSC content, I haven't seen anyone compare the PAL models to each other or to the North American models.

Thank you for the tip. Will try to get it. I attached the result with the Vortex TBC.
Yes, colors are gone with it. What a joke...

An example of fun I have.

021 : lines for few seconds on top then, it disappears
022 : lines appears then goes down - appears a lot on few sequences, probably because there's physical damage on these sections
023 : same thing, with jumping pictures
024 : blinking pictures

025 : no physical damage on the that section of the tape.
Only appears with TBC of JVC vcr, distortion on the top