Media collection organization, digitize plans?

[Haunted_TBC]

Back to MiniDV for a bit, I have question (and relaxation that may be of use to some).
Firstly, does anyone know of any filters that can be used by Hybrid to “Un-MiniDV” the footage while it’s deinterlaced? By this I mean doing the best job possible at trying to “uncompress” the NTSC 4:1:1 into 4:2:2.

Also, I made the mistake of updating to macOS Tahoe version 26. It completely kills all support for IEEE 1394 and rendered DVRescue useless! I had to create a macOS Sequoia volume on the device to get things going again. Although I will mention that for those of you that have an M5 or later Mac, there is no official way to do that since they currently support Tahoe only.

[latreche34]

I had success using Vdub2, Output as lossless HuffYUV 4:2:2 SD (YUV2), Then de-interlace with QTGMC and upscale to either HD (1440x1080) or UHD (2880x2160) depends on the need, If encoding is needed I can encode from either version to h.264 for playback.
Here is a sample I uploaded 2 years ago.

[Haunted_TBC]

I ended up doing both in Hybrid by selecting the 4:2:2 output.
Note to anyone doing this, for MiniDV, I had to select Bottom Field First as opposed to what I'm used to for analog with Top Field First for QTGMC.
Another question is about decks. The two cameras I have often struggle majorly to pick up all the frames from the first second of a timecode, and will freak out when presented with glitches, all of which may or may not crash DVRescue. I know Lordsmurf is anti-deck, but I feel like a really good deck would pick up the signal soon enough to get all of the frames and not freak out when a glitch occurs. Perhaps the opposite of Consumer Camera conservatism, which would rather stop and rewind than display a glitch.
Any recommendations on where to source one, and which model? And yes, ScenalyzerLive 4.0 did not fare any better, these cameras just don't have the signal coming online fast enough to get the entire timecode from 00:00:00;00 onwards streamed through the IEEE 1394 fast enough.

[aramkolt]

The best DV deck of all time is probably the DSR-2000A (the "A" means it definitely has the firewire output option, but some of the non-A ones had it as an option, you'll know it has it if you see the actual firewire port on the back).

It has some dynamic tracking functionality and it can do and can play any type of DV tape including those recorded at non standard speeds like LP. It has a "channel condition" monitor which relays how many errors it is seeing. Given that it has analog outputs and SDI also, you could also capture off of the SDI output as digital interlaced 480i. SDI wouldn't be considered a direct copy, though it would be a digital to digital version which is probably fairly visually lossless and would preserve interlacing and it shouldn't cause any sort of hiccup that would actually stop a capture, though hard to say what the displayed output will look like during rough sections of tape. I wouldn't normally do SDI capture with DV since it takes up more space, isn't mathematically lossless or a true transfer, and shouldn't look better, but it probably will push through errors that DV capturing devices may not.

When you are getting errors, do you visually see problems with the transferred footage, or are you just seeing errors reported?

I do have a DSR-2000A that I could see what it does with a problem tape if you like.

The DSR-2000A shouldn't be the main go-to for DV tapes in general since less complicated cameras can play most tapes exactly the same with an identical digital output, but for tapes that have issues, I'm told the DSR-2000A is indispensable and that most professional companies worth using probably have one just in case.

[Haunted_TBC]

There's only one (maybe two?) tapes I know of with proper timecode glitches (not dropouts). I believe both were due to part of the tape being reused, and thus two different frames were assigned the same timecode. I'm sure a good deck would solve that, since each camera I've tried glitches out during the transition. I captured the first frame of the changeover, but not the remaining 20.
My question is more so about the first 30 frames of a timecode/segment. I struggle to get all of them with the cameras, even after using super slow playback to verify existence of all frames. Do I need a deck because the uptime is low enough to capture the entire stream and nor miss the first second or less? It's especially hard when the timecode rests multiple times per tape, because the cameras then think something is wrong if 00:00:00;00 pops up a second time during the same play through. Only ejecting seems to help that, but still doesn't adresss the decks not wakeing up to the tape quickly enough to dump all the frames through IEEE 1394.
As for other glitches (dropouts, tape crinkles) DVRescue notifies me of those. I can deal with those.

[Haunted_TBC]

Just picked up a minty and functional HVR-M25U for the digital tapes. What's frustrating about HDVSplit is the primitive way it handles timecodes, since unlike DVRescue, I cannot confirm if the deck locked on to 00:00:00;00 at the start of each tape (or frustratingly, each section of some tapes). Timecode reset sections always trip up decks/cameras and cause so many headaches, I wish the gear could just lock on to the stream and also not stop if there's more than a four second signal gap. Sometimes I even have to turn off scene split on HDVSplit just to get fleeting shots!

[Haunted_TBC]

OK, I know some don’t like that Hybrid’s forced order of operations causes resize to happen before letterboxing, but I just did a test on some footage and it seems to work great/actually does not hurt? One screenshot shows no letterboxing and the other shows three pixels added to the top and bottom to compensate for the six pixels of cropped out head-switching noise. The only other processing done was using the LordSmurf settings and cropping off eight pixels from each side (704x480 became 640x480). I see no geometric distortion or missing picture, so I assume I did it right? I installed a new experimental version of Hybrid (silicon) and had to “re-plumb” or repath all the vaporsynth tools, but finally got it working. Have a look (screenshots are exact same frame from VLC):

[Haunted_TBC]

Update on the M25U, it actually fails to capture tape sections (first .2 seconds or so) of tapes where recording was started immediately, so even then I must resort to the cameras I already have. I believe this is due to the tape getting too far “behind” the deck’s larger mechanism compared to the smaller mechanism in the cameras, which allow for the signal to (theoretically but rarely in practice) lock on to the signal exactly at the first 00:00:00;00 timecode frame.

Also, onto Hybrid, I have perfected the Crop/Resize settings for creating Deinterlaced Proxies for both NTSC and PAL video. I am attaching my settings here, and I will also note that with shorter clips (under 10 minutes), using x264 for the video processing often leaves the resulting frame rate a bit below 50 or 59.94 frames per second (for example, 49.83 or 59.93), an issue I never have when processing with x265 and ProRes settings. Anyone know of a fix for that?