Welcome to digitalfaq!
To add to leeoverstreet's post:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ruby510
It's important to me to get the highest possible quality image and sound
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Those questions are easy enough to answer, especially since this forum has answered pretty much the same question through thousands of posts and thousands of working examples of digital processing from analog and DV sources. Not that there's a need to read through all of it (heavens, I would hope not!). But most of the posts here deal with achieving what you wrote: "to get the highest possible quality", and often to get it from damaged or poorly recorded tape. Members here over the years have tried to get those results for themselves and others without incurring a bill like the cost of Industrial Light & Magic or Disney Studios. The intent has been to use resources and methods within practical, learn-able, and achievable limits.
This is not rocket science. But you could say, to some extent, that some of it is art -- the acquired art of making sensible judgements toward accuracy, a pleasant visual experience, and lively re-living of taped memories or favorite entertainments -- as opposed to sloppily getting whatever is cheapest and quickest. Anyone can create a digital rendering of an analog tape or make a copy of a DV source. Seriously. No skill, no learning, no patience, no special hardware is required. Just push a couple of buttons. It's done all the time. But your question introduces a complication, in the form of the concept of "highest quality". I can try here to define or map out a path of how to get the highest quality we generally assume would be the target of users who come to an advanced video/audio site looking for answers. How far along that road you're willing to travel is up to you.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ruby510
It sounds like the Canopus products may not produce as good a final product as capture cards?
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The capture cards we recommend for analog source are optimized for capturing analog signals to clean digital video files. Canopus, despite their advertising, was not designed for analog sources. it is a lossy DV encoding device. It accepts analog signals, but it does not capture them; it encodes them to a lossy DV format. Cleanup and further encoding or modification entails further quality loss. DV was designed as a shoot-and-watch format, not as an editing or restoration format, and not for re-encoding to other formats. DV is PC-only playback. It is not supported by external media devices and is not used on the internet. Your smart Tv cannot play the DV format, nor can your new Bluray player or your external media servwr.
DV sources for quality processing are not captured, and they are not re-encoded through an encoding card such as a Canopus. As mentioned earlier, they are transferred as a 1:1 exact digital copy via Firewire using software such as WinDv, which is designed to transfer that digital source without alteration into a same-format digital file on a computer. To avoid further quality loss, DV is put through a post-processing workflow which, from the time the 1:1 copy is made to a PC, is the same process we recommend for edit and restoration of captured analog signals -- which is as follows:
Analog tape is captured to a lossless YUY2 colorspace in an unencoded AVI file using lossless codecs (
huffyuv, Lagarith, or UT Video Suite). DV sources, after copying as a lossy DV-format AVI file, are converted losslessly to YV12 colorspace interemediate working AVI files using lossless codecs (Lagarith or UT Video Suite). In other words, analog and DV sources are both used as lossless working files for repair, cleanup, edits, color correction, etc., and for final format encoding.
For cut-and-join edits and simple application of transitions and special effects, titles, etc, you can use any editing app you like that will accept lossless codecs (which includes almost every editor out there, from basic to "pro" editions). However, editors are not restoration, repair, or major image modification tools. Programs we recommended for the restoration and repair phase are Avisynth and
Virtualdub. These are good enough for professionals, so they should be good enough for us. They are also free. They are used to clean or repair DV compression artifacts, noisy edges, oversharpening, edge halos and DCT ringing, chroma noise (blotches, stains, rainbows), analog tape grain, dropouts (spots, ripples, horizontal streaks, static-filled frames), frame hops and jitter, excessive interlace combing, illegal video levels, chroma bleed, chroma shift, high-precision colorspace conversions, proper deinterlace or inverse telecine where required, and a host of other common defects that are ignored by the unskilled quick-and-dirty crowd.
Lossless working files can then be used for archives and can be encoded to any desirable output format: broadcast grade MPEG or h.264 for archiving, generic MPEG, DVD, Bluray, AVCHD, mp4, web posting, or any other standard or non-standard format.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ruby510
I want an uncompressed final product.
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Perhaps you might define what you mean by "final" product. Uncompressed files are very large, and are playable only with a computer. I think you mean you want lossless working files. Uncompressed YUV working files from analog captures and DV transfers run about 75GB to 85GB per hour in standard-definition frame sizes. RGB color for those same files would exceed 100GB per hour. With lossless codecs such as
Huffyuv, Lagarith or UT Video, the same files would be reduced to 1/3 the quoted sizes with absolutley no quality loss. But such files are used as working files, not as final output.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ruby510
It sounds like it would be good to invest in an S-VHS VCR. Which one is recommended and where could I find one?
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Not only would it be good idea, but it's practically an essential requirement. Want to use a cheap VCR? Your "highest quality" requirement just bit the dust. Good output begins with a quality capture. No quality capture, no quality output. Period. For vcr's We never never never recommend eBay or similar auction sites. You find good VCR's in our marketplace forum. A recommended source for rebuilt high-end VCRs and other rebuilt goods is
Tom Grant's shop.
Recommended VCRs for NTSC and PAL are listed here:
VCR Buying Guide (S-VHS, D-VHS, Professional) for restoring video
Which of those VCR line you should consider depends on your analog tape library. Are most of them retail tapes and tapes recorded at high 2-hour speed? All of the listed brands will do them justice. Are they slow-speed recordings, 4 to 6 or 8 hours??? I'm afraid Panasonic is your only choice. Slow-sped tapes look like crap on a JVC.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ruby510
Do all S-VHS have tgc built in so I wouldn't have to buy a separate tgc?
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It's "tbc", not tgc. Your question simply tells me that you don't know what a tbc is, not to mention that you don't know that there are two types of tbc. Both are needed.
What is a TBC? Time Base Correction for Videotapes
Who uses a DVD recorder as a line TBC, and what do you use?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ruby510
My computer is a smaller lenovo PC with tower. Can I add a firewire card as well as a capture card on this computer?
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Yes, you can add a PCI Firewire card for DV transfer. You'll need one that uses a texas Instrumengs processing chip. Here's one:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...-151-_-Product
Can't answer the rest of your question. How "small" is your small Lenovo? What's its model number? Does it have one hard drive (don't capture to your operating system's hard drive. Capture to a second drive). What's the operating system? The most recommended ATi All In Wonder cards require Windows XP and AGP-mount or PCIe motherboards.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ruby510
Are ATI capture cards still available anywhere?
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eBay sellers rip you off by selling the cards without their adapters and accessories, rendering them useless even as normal graphics cards. The safest source is our own marketplace forum. ATI cards are made with either NTSC or PAL tuners, but you won't use the tuners so they're irrelevant. The capture sections accept many NTSC, PAL, and foreign formats, with no problem.
ATI All In Wonder card models & Brief History of all In Wonder cards
The favorite AIW models are the 7500 AGP Radeon and 9600XT AGP Radeon. But they are all excellent cards.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ruby510
Do you connect the capture card to VHS-c camcorder and VCR via S-video cable?
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Yes, if you have s-video output available.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ruby510
Is this something that someone can do at home realistically?
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I have captured over 400 hours of homa-made VHS tapes and over 150 hours of retail tapes, and have studied and worked with hundreds of captured submissions in this forum and other forums. The threads you see in the capture, repair, and quality improvement forums are all questions and videos from home users, most of them just starting to learn the ropes.
For real-life examples from a real-life user (yours truly) who started out knowing absolutely nothing and made all kinds of stupid mistakes, here vare samples of some typical problems encountered with analog tapes. One sample is from a badly recorded original VHS, a second sample is from a poorly mastered and partially damaged retail tape, and the third is typical junky stuff you often see from home cameras (in this case a dying camera battery that resulted in underexposure and awful color). All of the repairs and encodings shown were made with techniques I learned in this forum, and using free software (Avisynth and
Virtualdub) plus a couple of budget-priced final output encoders. These samples show that even an idiot like myself can survive typical source problems.
A) The linked
Liv5A_cut_EP_original_cap.mp4 is from a 6-hour VHS tape recorded Dec 1992 using a noisy, under-powered analog cable signal fed thru a cheap RF amplifier, multiple cheap RF splitters, sent thru the world's cheapest home cables to a cheap mono 2-head 1989 RCA VCR on cheap no-name tape. As if that weren't dumb enough, I recorded at slow, low-detail 6-hour speed on used tape. The sample is hard telecined. Captured with a Panasonic PV-S4670 SVHS VCR (no dnr), a Panasonic ES10 tbc pass-thru, an AVT-8710 exernal rame tbc to correct false copy protection issues, and an All In Wonder 7500 AGP Radeon capture card. My expensive AG-1980 VCR wouldn't track this tape without serious top or side tinted border noise in various parts of the tape, so I had to improvise with another VCR and a pass-thru device. The original is telecined, from a 1954 movie.
In the unfiltered (A) original look for 2 frames near the clip's end (frame 1456-1457, 48.6 seconds) with a huge dark gray ball at screen center.
B)
Liv5A_ivtc_cut_EP_playback sample.mp4 is the cleaned-up version of the above. I'm not perfectly satisfied (of course not, and there are remnants of cyan and magenta rainbows in the blue sky). The unique look of 1954 Technicolor film isn't easy to get from bad tape.
The two videos above were posted earlier in this restoration thread:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...#ixzz5BTlegvEk
Links "C" and "D" are examples of other damage control. There are 4 short, edited scenes. Besides horrible color that varied from scene to scene, there are spots, gigantic blotches, projector punch holes, chroma bleed, dark halos, white stringy stuff on faces in one shot and whitish flareups, the usual tape noise, etc. The capture was made with a Pansonic PV-8662 rebuilt VCR with composite output, a Panasonic ES10 tbc pass-thru, An AVT-8710 frame tbc for Macrovision, and an ATI All in Wonder 9600XT AGP Adeon card. "D" is the clean-up version.
C_defect_samples_original.mpg
D_defect_samples_after.mpg
Finally, here's an underexposed home video tape made with an old JVC VHS camera, whose light meter battery was dying out. The capture was made using a Panasonic AG-1980 VCR, an AVT-8710 frame tbc, and an ATI All In Wonder 9600XT Radeon. The "E" version is directly from the lossless AVI capture, unfiltered. "F" version is the cleanup.
E)
home_tape_original.mp4
F)
home_tape_rework.mpg
All of these samples were previously posted in earlier threads and are typical of analog capture cleanup and encoding practices -- although many of them are not as troublesome. But you don't learn anything from "perfect" tapes and cleaner sources.
