Hello all, finally got past the stage of building and troubleshooting various aspects of my capture PC that would accept an AGP AIW 9000 Pro card and I'm trying to get an idea if there is much that I should expect to improve beyond what I've got here, or if there are some obvious issues to anyone can see with the capture itself.
Capture PC:
Runs XP
ASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA motherboard with Core2Extreme processor - Had to underclock to 2.4Ghz to get it to boot for some reason
4GB of ram (3.2GB visible to the system due to MOBO and 32 bit XP limitations)
New 700W modern ATX power supply and modern case from
Amazon
512GB SSD for the OS to run on (SATA)
2TB capture HDD (SATA)
AIW 9000 Pro 64MB video/capture card - Recapped all SMT and through-hole capacitors
4ft custom 8 pin to s-Video cable (to keep S-Video cable as short as possible, extra wires are not needed as audio in goes directly to TBSC sound card)
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz PCI Sound Card
VCR
Personally refurbished AG1980P with TBC/YC card, power supply, front display board, control board, Head Amp, RF Amp all fully recapped, others recapped as needed.
SOURCE - This was a commercially produced promotional video handed out in 1998 at the 80 year anniversary of the John Deere Waterloo Works in Waterloo, Iowa. Tape probably has had minimal playthroughs and is in very good condition, though it is getting to be 25 years old.
Video chain - for this test, it was just VCR straight to AIW card via S-Video without a full frame TBC, line TBC within the VCR was turned on. No dropped frames were noted during the capture.
Captured under "DVD-High" profile in MMC as MPEG2 - Raw file and the deinterlaced post processing files are both attached. I have also tried capturing in lossless and that gives a bit different of a color profile mainly, however I believe that YouTube eventually re-encodes at the same 4:2:0 that MMC does for MPEG.
Post processing - Used the Mpeg2 raw capture file also attached as the input to Hybrid with Bob deinterlacing to 59.94FPS, Cropped 8 pixels on both sides and 10 pixels from the bottom where you can see the head switching noise. This was then resized to 960x720 and bitrate was 5000Kbps. Eventually I'd like to have it be YouTube compliant which to my understanding allows for 8000kbps for 60fps 720P video, but that would be a bit above the 100MB limit for attachments here. I didn't mess with any "deblock", "dehalo", or sharpening settings which I understand can be helpful, would appreciate any recommendation if it looks like those would be beneficial here and to what degree. It's kind of interesting that both the input and post-processed files are about the same size, yet the post processed one looks a lot cleaner due to modern encoding and better deinterlacing.
I didn't mess with the pixel aspect ratio, but I do realize that could be off a bit with my cropping and resizing I did there. I'm open to suggestions about best ways to crop and resize within hybrid if that isn't ideal - I know there's something that can be done with pixel aspect ratios (PAR) but seems like just resizing would accomplish the same thing if plan is to be eventually viewing on YouTube, laptop, or a digital TV more or less used as a display. For YouTube, you want the resolution to be at least 720 vertically as it allows more bandwidth and I believe that is the lowest vertical resolution that allows for 60 frames progressive.
Also is interesting that supposedly YouTube will directly accept MPEG2 as an upload, so I'll have to see if it does its own sort of transcoding/deinterlacing in some way that I suppose could even be better than what Hybrid does (but I doubt it haha). Also that would mean you're stuck with the lower image noise and side bars most likely which isn't ideal.
I will say that the colors on the post-processed file look oversaturated, but I also can't say that looks particularly bad. Not sure what setting in hybrid I'd use to change that? I figured it would look pretty similar to the input since I left most of the settings at defaults other than crop/resize, deinterlace. Could have something to do with a color space conversion maybe?
Any suggestions/comments appreciated - I'm a total novice, so I don't expect to have "gotten it right" first try. I do have some other fancy equipment that I'm not exactly sure how I'd integrate into the capture system including analog pattern generators, analog waveform monitor and vectorscope, as well as a couple of TBCs (DPS-235 and Hotronic AP41 with the S-Video in/out as well as DOC (dropout compensation) upgrades).