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Originally Posted by ammonrose
I want to start digitizing my dad's home videos and I want to get the best quality out of it. I am a video/audiophile.
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As a self-described videophile/audiophile, I must urge you to not get ridiculous when it comes to certain aspects.
For example, trying to 100% eliminate the overscan noises that you never saw on screen anyway. What always happens is that chasing these unimportant issues makes you ignore/overlook the important ones. In the case of overscan noise, you can do it, but at the sacrifice of other worse image issues.
Avoid compulsive buying, knee-jerk buying -- especially because random person said random thing (as opposed to somebody known and respected in the community; and yes, that includes myself, but also others).
I've see this play out, it never ends well. So heed my advice here.
Analog video conversion is like The Price Is Right game show. Get as close as you can to the actual quality on the tape, with going over(board).
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What I have so far:
VCR - JVC HR-S7600U
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That can be fine.
PAL or NTSC?
If PAL, one of my favorite decks.
If NTSC, it can give you some grief in usage. Good deck, I have one, not my favorite. Not a bad deck, but you said "best of the best", and that's usually not it.
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Capture Card - Elgato (I know this isn't great, it's just what I have, but please tell me what's the best!)
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This depends on OS.
If XP can be used, then certain ATI AIW are extremely hard to beat for quality.
Note that you should use dedicated system for capture, not try to use your daily email/Facebook/gaming/whatever to also capture video. It never ends well, computers need less noise and clutter to capture well.
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That's it for right now. I obviously want to upgrade my capture card to whatever is considered the best, and I plan on buying a DataVideo TBC 1000 when I can afford to.
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The DataVideo TBC-1000 is most popular, but certainly not best. I have one, and it's in a drawer 99% of the time. I use better TBCs. For starters, there is no single "TBC-1000" but rather multiple revisions, with the mid revisions being pretty dreadful. The TBC-3000 4th gen is vastly better, though more rare. Most of the best TBCs are extremely rare now, and can take years to locate. I do have leads on a few, but it'll cost you.
As most know, I sell a few items on the
marketplace subforum, including
TBCs for sale. Too often, people pass on better TBCs because they've "never heard of it" (which is silly, considering they never worked in video). Certain Cypress can be vastly better in some situations, while something like the early BV10 can be a real find. The DataVideo TBC-1000 does have the best resale, but that's because it's most discussed. Part of that is my fault, as I didn't really discuss other TBCs until the 2010s. Back in the 90s-2000s, those other TBCs were 2x+ the price of the TBC-1000 and green AVT-8710. But times have changes, all have settled up near the same pricing. Some of the better TBCs even command less price now, go figure! Real life popularity contest, just like grade/high school.
@ others who may read this later, read carefully: TBC-1000 is not bad, but the DataVideo TBC-1000 is simply not the best of the DataVideo/Cypress TBCs intended for consumer analog sources.
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That brings us to budget. I don't care how much the best cost, I just want to know what it is so I can plan it out to buy it in the near future.
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The best gear isn't available on a shelf at
Amazon, ready to ship when you want it. And because it's all used now, even if you "see it" somewhere (eBay being the worst), it may not function correctly (or at all). So this does take some degree of planning. I generally have stuff already, or know where to get it (offline, my contacts).
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I'd love to get your thoughts on what gear I need and what gear will give me lossless quality! If there are options out there that make the quality higher than the original then I'm curious to hear about that as well, but I'm mainly looking for lossless quality.
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Hardware doesn't really "make it better than the original" in an academic sense, but rather extract the full quality from the tape (which most people have never actually seen). That's always been my goal, to be as faithful to the source as possible. And at all budgets, within information on what you lose by trading down to this or that.
For me, at this point, I need to know
- PAL or NTSC (or both?)
- OS for capture computer, and if willing to get/use dedicated capture system (best!)
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Originally Posted by latreche34
Use it, post samples and go from there.
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I don't think that's needed at this stage. We can already see lack of frame TBC, bad capture card, iffy VCR (DD, etc).
