VHS-C poor footage possible to salvage?
 

This is the first post in the forum, so I'd like to say hello to everyone!

I have a very small archive of VHS-C tapes from the past, and they have maintained good health. But two of them were inferior compared to others, and after reading some posts here and having possibility to use some signal processing of Sony RDR-HXD870 compared to direct capture from VCR I decided to try to digitize the tapes once again.
Now I know that the cause of problems with quality was multiple recording on the same tape and poor camcoder quality (that was during "poor", student times...), and recordings had been distorted like that directly after recording. Back in 2004 I have digitized the tapes and they were exhibiting identical defects, so I don't see any significant aging of the media.
In most scenes overwriting on already recorded tape did not render catastrophic degradation of quality (weaker saturation), however some scenes got really distorted. Once again - that is not a result of a worn tape, probably poor erasing and interference of new recording with the previous ones.
Knowing the above is there any potential chance to restore the recordings in some way using best gear available?

First sample, tape 1, for first 20 minutes recordings were fair (poor saturation), but suddenly from a new scene big distortions got into the recordings:
Attachment 15675

Second sample, same tape as above, but further scenes, chroma distortion and complete loss of colours during one scene:
Attachment 15676

And last example of tape nr 2, whole tape is characterized by almost complete lack of saturation, in some scenes there is clear flickering visible:
Attachment 15677

Is it possible to rectify any of the above problems? If yes, at which stage of the capture? Better VCR? Better DNR/TBC? Digital postprocessing after capture?

Any advice would be of great help, I have opportunity to buy a Panasonic DMR-ES15, but if it would not help my problems then I would skip unnecessary purchase, as my archive is small and decent except for the two tapes.

Thank you in advance!

Your aspect ratio is wrong, How did you capture those tapes? I'm not sure if you can recover the bad tapes but you should try a VCR with built in line TBC and S-Video out and a high quality VHS-C adapter, Otherwise there is nothing you can do about them.

That was just a quick capture using Elgato Game Capture card over HDMI only for presentation purposes.
So VCR with TBC will do a better job that TBC pass-through of ES10/ES15, right?
OK, I have done the homework and read the TBC FAQ :-) Clear, I skip the ES15 unit and start looking for some studios with good S-VHS VCR...

In almost all cases, yes.

The ES10/15 is not a TBC, not a TBC replacement. It's just a strong+crippled line TBC with non-TBC frame sync. ES10/15 has noticeable quality-reducing side effects, has a fail rate (tapes will not transfer properly), and overall looks worse than S-VHS VCR with line TBC > quality frame sync TBC. ES10/15 is a budget method, but you get budget results, budget quality.

Ideally, ES10/15 is for anti-tearing only, not as a half-baked TBC (attempted) replacement.

For the budget effect I found RDR-HXD870 having quite acceptable "stabilisation" effect on reasonable sources, so ES10/15 would be superior in doing that.

Coming to original question I understood that a good VCR *could* to some extent reduce the defects in my samples? Is it worth asking for lossless capture for further attempts for post-processing or VCR is the last step for that sources?

It is not possible to fix all the defects you shown in post-processing; some marginal improvement on chroma issues only. Better to start from the most possible clean capture anyhow.

Wouldn't bet on that in this case, the tbc function in the panasonic dvd-recorders is more capable than the built-in TBCs in the JVCs and in the NV-HS1000 (I haven't used any of the later panasonics with tbc so can't speak for those) in my experience at least. S-Video output may or may have some impact here though given the messed up recording but hard to say for sure.

What VCR did you use for these, and do you have access to another one just to see if any parts look different?

What I demonstrated was the output of Panasonic NV-HD620 + Sony RDR-HXD870 HDMI 720@50p pass-through captured with Elgato card, so some fixing/filtering/deinterlacing done by Sony. So absolutely nothing particular - just consumer stuff.

However now I went to archives from 2005, when I was digitizing very same tapes with Philips camcoder as playback device (the one which made recordings) using composite output and captured with some Asus '99 graphic card with capture input. Now I see horrible block artifacts from compression, I was encoding with S-VCD format as target. But those comparison samples can demonstrate how the recordings were played back when still "fresh".

Attachment 15681
Attachment 15682

Here I couldn't show the same scene, as back in 2005 I have cut it when editing, but I attach a sample of adjacent one showing same effect:
Attachment 15683

The camcoder was Philips VKR6837, which was rebadged Panasonic NV-MC6, looking at service manual it only had composite video output, so no way to get separated chroma and luma from that device.

Those problems are beyond normal ways fix, Some had luck miss aligning a camcorder to get better tracking, if you think you are skilled enough to do it give it a shot, Otherwise send them to someone who has such setup, Again the results are not 100% guaranteed.

Sure, have also another JVC camcoder, fiddling with tracking only adds problems, nothing improves, so definitely not an easy case. Now I'm contacting some studios asking for the gear they have, but in most cases the answer I get is "high grade devices" etc. so not really appealing that it's worth trying. I see also an JVC HR-S8600EU for sale, might want to give it a try, especially considering that I could have it for the price of 2-3 commercial digitizations.

Something to keep in mind that if your tapes are recorded in one of those long recording speeds don't look for studio or pro equipment, Those run only at SP speed (standard play).

On some of the clips the head switching point is moving all over so that's definitely an issue that happened when it was recorded. The servo circuit in the vcr is supposed to lock to the incoming video signal when recording so the start of a frame is a few lines after the switch between heads but in this case it doesn't seem to have locked at all. (You can sometimes get a second or two of it moving at the start of a recording when e.g dubbing vcr to vcr but not to this level.)

On those clips you can also spot the difference here between the clip recorded via the Sony dvdr and the old recording in how fast the video signal stabilizes after the distortion caused by the head switch, the one with the sony does it much faster, on the old recording you see the video is shifted for many lines before it's back to the correct position. The panasonic dvd-recorders are ever better in this regard, able to recover almost instantly, the built in JVC tbc not so much. (I've tested this a bit with a tape where I managed to record with the head switch in the middle of the picture by using a AG7350 with mismatched external sync input)

And yeah challenge with getting a company to do it for you is that they might charge extra if you want them to debug/get the best out of a borked tape rather than just give whatever the first attempt outputs.

All of the stuff I want to preserve is SP recording, original VHS-C tape or copy VHS-C -> VHS.
I was about to invest ~50 EUR for a ES15 unit, but decided to spend the money on a VCR. Thank you for the observations, just now I compared the direct output of the VCR vs pass-through of DVR and definitely Sony (Pioneer) does a decent job of suppressing that defect.

I have contacted 2 studios so far, and when I asked them about the gear in their workflow and demonstrated same samples the response was not very convincing - like "we have high class VCRs, and in many cases it's sufficient to change the playback device", makes the impression that their interest/capability to take the challenge is somewhat limited. I have ordered the JVC VCR, I guess it's more worth trying than paying 30-40 EUR for digitizing commercially without any guarantees that someone will try tackling the issue.

"VHSC tape recorded with massive alignment (tracking) error" by video99.co.uk
Video Here

Yeah that shows what sort of symptom you get if a recording was done with bad alignment, on the samples from OP it doesn't look like that is what the problem is however.