AVT-8710 introducing flagging?

[snowpeck]

Is there something up with my AVT-8710 TBC or am I not using it correctly? It seems that anything I feed through it that needs TBC ends up with flagging at the top of the picture that was not there previously, no matter which VCR (admittedly all of which are run-of-the-mill standard VHS) I try.

[sanlyn]

If you make a capture without the AVT, you'll see that your VCR plays with line sync errors. A frame-level tbc like the AVT-8710 doesn't correct in-frame line timing errors, only frame by frame timing. You need a line-level tbc or a VCR that has one built-in.

Make a short capture without the AVT and watch it closely. Line sync errors show up as bent, warped, or notched verticals, bent or notched side borders, etc. A common but rather mild example of line "wiggles" produced by typical scanline errors is here: http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/3...=1#post1882662.

More severe examples were posted in an earlier thread. Below are links to 2 samples of scanline errors. The tape was played with a non-tbc VCR. While the bad demo looks like a severe case, it's not as uncommon as you'd think. This sort of top-border flagging and frame slippage happens often with old tapes. Some tapes will play without this severity, some won't.

- A1_Sample2_bad.mpg is the original capture encoded to MPEG, with frame size slightly reduced to prevent TV overscan from hiding some of the problems.
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...sample2_badmpg

- B1_Sample2_fix.mpg is the tape played with a line tbc pass-thru device.
The "fixed" sample shown is a first-stage test repair with only basic denoising, improved afterwards with a better VCR but here addressing only specific issues. The tape is no longer available.
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...sample2_fixmpg

[snowpeck]

Thanks for the advice. So does that mean I wasted the money I spent on the AVT-8710 or can I still get some use out of it?

[msgohan]

It's a fact of life with these stupid boxes. Some tapes end up with tearing when the AVT-8710 is used. JVC's internal S-VHS/D-VHS TBC has the same problem.

I've seen this myself, and here is just one thread about it.

http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/2...an-without-%21

[sanlyn]

I agree with msgohan on the tearing issue. IF you can get an ES10 or ES15 used and hook it up as pass-thru between your VCR and capture device, you'll get decent line sync correction and some level of frame sync. Or get a VCR with built-in line tbc, if you can find one that still works. Note that full frame tbc's can correct for Macrovision, but pass-thru can't.

[snowpeck]

When I was shopping for TBC I was trying to decide between a JVC VCR with built-in TBC or the AVT-8710 as I couldn't afford both at the time. Maybe I leaned the wrong way. I guess I could still resell the 8710.

For some background here, I'm trying to embark on digitizing my massive VHS collection (probably in the neighborhood of 600-700 tapes), most of which were home-recorded off cable TV on VCRs that have long since ended up at the landfill, though some were recorded using the VCRs I currently own. A fair number have tracking issues. Some were acquired from other collectors and are therefore multi-generational.

[sanlyn]

Quote:

Originally Posted by snowpeck

When I was shopping for TBC I was trying to decide between a JVC VCR with built-in TBC or the AVT-8710 as I couldn't afford both at the time. Maybe I leaned the wrong way. I guess I could still resell the 8710.

Maybe you were confusing line tbc's and frame tbc's. JVC and Pansonic TBC machines have line tbc's. The AVT handles frames only. You can often survive without a frame tbc unless you have bad frame timing from a VCR. But with analog tape a line tbc is essential.

Quote:

Originally Posted by snowpeck

For some background here, I'm trying to embark on digitizing my massive VHS collection (probably in the neighborhood of 600-700 tapes), most of which were home-recorded off cable TV on VCRs that have long since ended up at the landfill, though some were recorded using the VCRs I currently own. A fair number have tracking issues. Some were acquired from other collectors and are therefore multi-generational.

At last, someone who's ahead of me in tape volumes. I started with a mere 340 tapes. About 20 left.

Uh-oh, multi-generation tape.

If you had no tbc with the player that played the old tapes into another vcr, you can't undo the line wiggles caused from playback with no line tbc. At least capturing the dupes with a line tbc of some kind (built-in or pass-thru) will keep things from looking worse. TBC doesn't work during VCR record, only during playback.

VHS requires cleanup. The capture and the final product won't look any better than the tape without post-processing/denoising at some level . Note that movies are film source, which is progressive video and is telecined to get proper playback speed. For any real cleanup you'll have to learn occasional inverse telecine (degree in rocket science not required!). If you're ever of a mind to deinterlace movie source, note that deinterlacing won't work with telecined video. Many old TV shows are telecined film, and many new ones as well. Stuff like Castle, Blue Bloods, Hill Street Blues, Law And Order, PBS Masterpiece Theater, even I Love Lucy, etc., are telecined. BBC shows through PBS are often PAL to NTSC conversions with all kinds of nutty telecine and dupe-frame patterns, a real pain in the neck sometimes. Often telecine removal isn't necessary for cleanup. It depends on specific problems with the source.

If any of your old tapes are retail movies and in pretty good condition, they can often be recorded directly to a DVD recorder at high bitrates for decent results. This won't look as clean as a lossless capture cleaned up, but many times it will suffice and save time. You'll need the AVT for most of those retail jobs (and a line tbc in circuit before the signal gets to the AVT). Home-made recordings off cable TV or antenna are usually a noisy mess and don't translate well onto DVD recorders. A home VCR can't make a tape as cleanly as a pro mastering lab (although I've had some retail lab jobs that were complete train wrecks, LOL!).

BTW, I think you're in NTSC country. Correct us if that's not the case.

[snowpeck]

Yep, NTSC. All of that makes perfect sense. My Sony DVD recorder can deal with some tearing/flagging and other issues on passthrough, but I definitely think I need to resume looking at VCRs. There may be a few commercial VHS tapes that I would like to transfer, but not very many. My Hauppauge capture device doesn't seem to pay any attention to Macrovision anyway.

I know I can't improve upon the quality of the VHS recordings, but I don't want to make them look worse due to improper equipment. I just want the best digital representation possible of the information on the tapes.

[sanlyn]

Quote:

Originally Posted by snowpeck

I know I can't improve upon the quality of the VHS recordings...,

You're correct about your quality concerns, but VHS captures can definitely be improved. This forum has hundreds if not thousands of examples of bad noisy ugly captures made good.

Not all DVD recorders can be used for pass-thru. Pass-thru doesn't mean using the DVD recorder to record, when most of them do have active tbc during the record process. Pass-thru refers to connecting VCR output to the recorder's input, then going directly from the recorder's output to a capture device. Of those that can be used for pass-thru, most have only so-so resolving power. If you're going to put down $$ for a good pass-thru unit, which don't cost all that much these days, Panasonic's DMR-ES10 and DMR-ES15 are the most powerful of the lot, with the ES10 preferred.

The "best quality" from VHS has been discussed to death. Basically, the "best" digital transfers from VHS involve capture to lossless media, post-processing cleanup and edits, and final encoding with a good encoder (many of which are free). None of us can afford the vast array of shop gear used by pros, but their methods are available to all of us.

If your tapes are recorded at 4-hour or 6-hour speed, that would eliminate JVC. JVC never gave much support to recording formats except VHS-SP two-hour mode. longer recording speeds require a different video head configuration and circuitry. Panasonic would be the better choice.

For what it's worth, here are two samples of really horrible ugly noisy grungy video recorded to a cheap 2-head VCR at 6-hour speed on cheap tape. If you can't imagine how bad a cable signal can be sometimes, here is part of that recording, with no cleanup except mild grain removal: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...0_mdegrain2mp4

From that same 1991 recording of the same 1954 movie broadcast, here's a restoration. Not perfect, but watchable. My old notes say that this scene was captured with a Panasonic PV-S4670 SVHS VCR (no tbc) and a Panasonic ES10 pass-thru into an ATI AIW 9600XT capture card, to losslessl AVI . The results after post-process restoration in Avisynth and VirtualDub, which are both free: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...back-samplemp4

Yes, it can be done. That project was 4 years ago. I no longer have the original caps. Thank goodness I had better signals to work with most of the time.

[snowpeck]

My tapes are almost all 6-hour mode, so I guess I should look at Panasonic then, if I can find one that works in my price range. Will having an upscale VCR help at all with tracking issues?

[sanlyn]

Upscaling has no effect on tracking. Poor tracking, though, will make upscaling look pretty lurid. What you'll get by upscaling low-resolution tape in a standard frame will be fuzzy blurry low-resolution pictures in a big frame. High definition starts with a high resolution source, not with a low resolution source. HD is based on resolution, not on frame size. You can make standard definition analog video look pretty good when done carefully and letting your player or TV take care of scaling. Analog tape simply doesn't have the resolution for a major upscaling effort. It's work enough to get a good capture and a clean DVD (you can encode standard def to high bitrate Standard Definition BluRay, by the way), much less to stretch a small image into a big frame full of software interpolation errors and magnified defects. Better to let your player or TV do it with hardware scaling designed to suit the specific display doing the work. Not all players and TVs are talented upscalers, but most brand-name sets are pretty good at it as well as with deinterlacing during playback.

There are threads that report on the ability of various capture and playback devices to force low resolution sources into bigger ones. By the time you capture a VHS image to 720x480 (720x576 for PAL), you've reached -- and slightly surpassed -- the bandwidth and detail limit of VHS. Low bandwidth means constricted fine (high-frequency) detail beyond certain capture sizes. If you want more fine detail at big frame sizes, you need a higher bandwidth to interpret higher-frequency detail. Analog tape and tape playback simply don't have the needed bandwidth, nor the desired resolution. DVD and HD use higher bandwidth processing, so more fine detail is encoded and displayed from high bandwidth sources. If you don't have that bandwidth to begin with, you won't get what you're looking for.

On the upside, that lower bandwidth does inhibit higher noise levels. If you think VHS looks noisy or grainy, imagine how much worse it would look if you added higher-bandwidth noise.

Upscaling doesn't create detail. Something that many users tend to forget is that you can't create detail from nothing.

[snowpeck]

Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear. By upscale I just meant fancier, more expensive and with more features, as opposed to the bargain basement VCRs I have now.

[sanlyn]

Well, yes, that's a different kind of upscaling, LOL!

You get better results with better hardware. There are some pretty decent mainstream non-tbc VCR's around, but most of them are limited to the 1995-1996 era, with a few contenders coming in about 1998. Except for a few highest-end TBC units, VCR's made after 1998 were plastic disasters. 1998 models themselves were nothing to shout about. Panny that year made the PV-8661, probably one of the most popular VCRs around. I used to have one. Looked great, or so I thought then. I even made some pretty good captures with it, but it took a lot of cleanup work. The 8661 oversharpens, overjuices contrast, pushes reds, and developed the habit of tracking tapes with several instances of complete dropout (pure static) or even sequences of pure blue screen.

By the end of the 90's most VCR makers were already machining for DVD. Even DVD recorders have passed their peak; DVD recorders and players peaked in quality by 2006, and it's been downhill since. You see DVDRs at Walmart and elsewhere with names like Toshiba and Panasonic on the front, but they're entirely outsourced. No big name OEM has made a U.S. DVDR for several years.

You can indeed get rebuilt prosumer VCR's from a few pro shops, TGrantPhoto being one. But rebuilding to pro specs is not a cheap proposition. No one tries replacing prosumer capacitors with caps from RadioShack unless they're clueless or con artists. With the demise of consumer VCRs, buyers flooded auction sites and Craigs List searching for high-end JVC's and Panasonics, buying them up in droves and then using them to death. Even models in not-great shape were scavenged for parts, since parts support ended years ago.

The big trouble with all burned-out VCR's is that most can't be repaired, and many are sold at indecent prices but don't even power up any more. If they do work well, it's because someone carefully rebuilt them -- but unfortunately, high-precision internal components wear thin quickly, requiring frequent maintenance. The Panasonic AG-1980 is the worst such scoundrel; a rebuild works OK for a few months, and a good rebuild works spectacularly well. But just sitting on the shelf unused for a few months will suddenly reveal high-tech capacitors with aging effects. The metal video heads are pretty rugged, but everything else slips into senility almost overnite. The best bet is a shop like TGrant's. He does good work. But good work ain't cheap. JVC high enders, meanwhile, tend to acquire serious tracking problems that eat tape.

With a pass-thru device like an ES10, you're not tied to a single player to get tbc activity. Panasonic's old PV-4500/4600 series hold up well if not abused, and the PV-S4670 SVHS series put out an image that looks a lot like Pannie's AG pro series but without DNR. Fact is, I've had tapes that didn't make nice with my AG-1980 but they were very comfy with my PV-4665. Nothing unusual there. The higher the Panny "PV" model number, the higher-end they are. These players are pretty rugged, many with Dynamorphous metal heads, and not given to severe aging of their electronic innards as pro sets are. One thing to watch when searching for mainstream better-quality Pannies and similar models: starting in 2000 or so Panasonic began renumbering their new junk VCR's with the '4600' series numbers, but craftily sneaked in an extra "V" to indicate a newer and lower grade version. So a 2001 PV-V4665 (note the extra "V" in the middle) is a damn poor excuse for the original 1996 PV-4665 without the extra "V".

Everyone demands built-in DNR, but this feature is often more of a curse. DNR can over-smooth and destroy detail, can cause motion smearing and ghosting, and has other ill effects. I've spoken with users who prefer a no-dnr player or one where dnr can be disabled; today's Avisynth filters are far more sophisticated than ancient dnr circuits. Truth be told, I've used dnr-equipped players from Panny and JVC alike, and in the end I still required more (and better) denoising in post-processing. The best cleaning feature of the semi-pro guys IMO is the way they help minimize chroma noise, shift, and bleed, which the non-pro models tend to neglect. There are filters for those defects, but they're a pain in the neck.

There are a couple of late-era Mitsubishi's that play well, and several lesser models that are pretty awful (thank to waning QC at Matsushita Electric, parent to Panasonic). Before jumping ahead into any purchase, inquire here. There are a couple of buyer's guide threads with discussions. Above all, be very careful with auction sites. Avoid a VCR selling for dirt cheap like $25, or has no notes about rebuilding ("tested, works great!" is not useful detail and is basically meaningless, or likely a lie), has nothing about return policy, or has "no returns accepted" displayed, has no remote (sometimes you can get them cheap separately, but you will need one), or the seller also handles ski racks, dinnerware, and old typewriter ribbons on the side -- a junkman, not a tech.

Fifteen years ago there were a lot of good used VCRs around. Five years later, finding one became work. Today it's torture. But I still see new members somehow finding workable machines, maybe not always the very best but still serviceable. You can still buy a new outsourced re-tagged DVD/VHS combo today -- if you see one, run the other way. They are all horrible players.

[snowpeck]

Here's what all this boils down to. Given what my VHS collection mainly consists of, what would be the best and most economical set of equipment for digitizing it? I already have a capture device I like and the time base corrector I previously mentioned. Am also running audio through a mixer board to help regulate audio levels during the recording.

[sanlyn]

Well...you can always keep using your current VCR until something else comes along. Your first concern should be a used DMR-ES10 or DMR-ES15 DVD machine for pass-thru. It doesn't have to be in great shape (my ES10 has a big dent in the top cover the size of a half dollar). A line tbc alone makes a difference, even with ye olde "standard" VCR. Shouldn't cost more than a c-note, but likely will cost less. And don't take too long: the pass-thru trick has been discovered by one and all, so prices will only go up. Don't fall for an ES20, which is easy to find -- its tbc is anemic at best. With the ES10 or ES15 you can input composite video and then output cleaner s-video that has been through Panny's y/c comb filter, which is pretty decent.

If you haven't already, learn to capture with VirtualDub to lossless media using a lossless compressor like huffyuv or Lagarith to reduce capture size without incurring lossy compression damage (because, of course, Huff and Lagarith are indeed lossless). Capture 720x480 in a YUY2 colorspace to retain the original chroma from VHS, which is stored as YPbPr.

If you haven't already, you should download the free VirtualDub (32-bit) and Avisynth (32-bit). Don't get into Avisynth immediately, but do keep it around. Don't use the 64-bit versions of those apps -- there are hardly any 64-bit filters available for them, so stick with 32-bit. 32-bit isn't "slower", it just has access to less RAM than 64-bit apps have. If you have up to 3.6 GB RAM that's plenty for standard def 32-bit processing and far more than enough for VirtualDub capture.

If you want members here to evaluate your captures for any problems, you can make lossless unprocessed edits of a few seconds of video in Virtualdub, and can post in this forum up to 99MB. 10 seconds of YUY2 Lagarith or Huffyuv video would not be 99MB, but likely half that size.

[snowpeck]

My biggest concern I guess is the tapes that have tracking issues. What would be the best suggestion to help with those?

[sanlyn]

A VCR with more stable tracking, obviously. And one that hasn't been used to death or badly maintained. But even with more stable tracking, you still need a line tbc (Sorry, but even good tracking can't replace a line tbc for smooth playthru and less noise). A recently rebuilt prosumer vcr will have been checked and sent thru a precision realignment.

Generally speaking, SONY hasn't made a really sturdy, hefty VCR since the early 1990's. I still have my 1991 SONY SLV-585HF, rebuilt at considerable expense about 12 years ago, especially for capturing old tapes originally recorded on that machine. I don't think IMO that Sony had made comparable VCR's since 1993 or so. Yet I gave my father in law my old 2004 basic SONY VCR (model #?. Can't remember). It's kinda noisy, although it sat unused in its original box for some years. Had nice color and contrast with EP tapes, though, and tracked pretty well. But even on the old guy's CRT you can see that the player definitely needs a line tbc.

You can google to search the videohelp forum for posts by Orsetto, who I think has used and/or repaired every VCR made during the past 25 years. His preference is Panasonic, but he's enjoyed others.

Meanwhile a copy of the nearly-rare and highly regarded PV-S4670 SVHS with recent cleaning and alignment was on eBay. The sale ended 6 days ago, for $138 (Ah, so the prices are going up, eh?). You see PV-S4670's sold now and then. But PV-4665 and PV-4668 and other 1995-96 models with Dynamorphous video heads show up more often. Of course there's always TGrantPhoto for rebuilt pro machines. TGrant often has lesser but still excellent models on sale occasionally whenever he gets his hands on one to rebuild.

I recall seeing someone mention recently that there was a decent JVC that worked well with 6-hour tapes, one of the few JVC's that do. If anyone recalls that model number, speak up. I think it was...SR-V101? Maybe? Or was it an earlier 1990's model?

[lordsmurf]

Don't forget this: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vcr-...-8710-doa.html
That's always a possibly, too.

[snowpeck]

Quote:

Originally Posted by lordsmurf

Don't forget this: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vcr-...-8710-doa.html
That's always a possibly, too.

I'm pretty sure there's fortunately nothing wrong with my 8710. Most tapes even when played back on my cheapo VCRs do end up looking amazing when fed through it. The tapes I was trying that ended up with flagging in the 8710 were ones that needed line TBC apparently, which is why I ended up with the AG-1980 that I'm discussing in another thread. The TBC-related issues with those clear up pretty much completely when played back in it. It just introduces its own issues due to its need of new capacitors.