Trying to get a working VHS workflow?

[armyofquad]

I have been having a heck of a time getting a successful workflow for VHS conversion. I feel like I'm being pulled in so many different direction, and just encounter problem after problem, error after error.

I use a ATI All-In-Wonder pro card for s-video capture, with a Mitsubishi MD-3000U VCR.

In the past I had used huffyuv and lagarith codecs for lossless capture. At some point a bunch of technobabble entered into one of my past threads on videohelp about color issues, without any clear answer as to what I was supposed to do about that, to me it was a bunch of technobabble without any actual steps or clear direction on how to deal with it.

This led me to using cineform for my capturing compression.

I captured a bunch of VHS. But then needed to deal with what to do with the files.

I've seen confusing talk that I feel is either not clear or not defined for current times about TV vs stream viewing. Which is rather misleading these days as so much of streaming is done on a TV. But I interpret it to mean at this point DVD playback to a TV vs just about everything else. The point being trying to determine if one should deinterlace or leave the capture interlaced.

But before we get to that - that chatter had me wondering, did my capture actually capture interlaced? Because I didn't recall a setting for that at any point of setting up my capture setup. So I checked the mediainfo, and it identified it as progressive. Which had me all kinds of frustrated that I'd have to redo hours of work. But it turns out it is interlaced - so I'm not sure what is up with that, just another confusing step along the way.

So, I have my interlaced data, and I can use that and leave it interlaced to go to DVD. But then if I want to make files to share, that should be deinterlaced. Which leads us to the next pain point.

At many times when looking for advice, there will be utterings of QTGMC, without any clear direction as to what that is, or how to use it. So I spent many hours banging my head against that brick wall, error after error, problem after problem, as there's no clear and easy way to just install it and have it work, and all the moving parts have various ways of being bitchy or unhappy with some file being here, or this being that version, and whatnot. Would really be nice if someone could come up with an easy way to do QTGMC.

Anyways, I finally get to a point that I have a create a working script in avspmod, open it in virtualdub, and export to a new file.

Except - what do I export to. Cinaform again?

So I do, and I get odd things.

First, I tried a small sample, gave me an odd fps of 58.898. That fps is going to cause all kinds of problems, won't line up with anything, will probably have vegas blurring things together if I try to render that to a standard framerate.

But, whatever - lets at least test run a full capture see if maybe that works right.

Well, I do that, but virtualdub2 has this flaw I encounter so many times, it's frustrating as hell, frequently if I save a large file in virtualdub or virtualdub2, it gives me a file Vegas won't acknowledge, and playing back in VLC gives an error about a missing or broken index, and asks about building a temporary index. Nothing I do fixes this. I've asked about these errors several times on forums, got technobabble, but no actual working process to avoid this or fix this.

So that's where I'm currently at, a workflow that may have some things that make sense but I have no idea if it all makes sense or not, and an end result that is broken files I can't use anyways.

[aramkolt]

Ya, I get that capturing and then processing later can be frustrating for sure.

I myself haven't done much in the way of captures since I want to make sure everything "capture chain wise" is the "best" I can get it, and that means lots of hardware to test. Sooooo many variables. A lot of that hardware testing can be skipped by using known good hardware suggested on this site, but there's also caveats to a lot of what's suggested here, such as requiring an XP system to capture in many cases.

As for QTGMC, I think you might find either staxrip or hybrid the most easy to use without necessarily having to write a script first. If your goal is to edit the video files after deinterlacing in something like Vegas, then you'll want to output the video from QTGMC to a relatively high bitrate/less compressed format such as ProRes 422/ProRes HQ/Huffyuv which Vegas should play nice with.

This tutorial was generally pretty helpful for the staxrip piece. You don't have to do the AI upscaling and all that if you don't want to at the end.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sYV-tf05-Q

If you can post a sample of your video, we should be able to confirm for sure that it is interlaced, though I don't think that the AIW card will capture in anything else besides interlaced unless you're having it do some format conversion which I don't think it would do with the default settings and virtualdub/amarec/XP era programs.

If your goal is to send out standalone discs to people and the videos will be in the 1.5-2 hour range (or double that if using a dual layer DVD), then DVD can be a decent distribution format, though you are still relying on the deinterlacing circuit in the player or the TV depending if it is a Progressive scan DVD player and if you are using the component or HDMI output. If you were viewing it on an old school CRT TV, interlaced playback is required. My understanding is that Progressive scan DVD players with 480p output basically double the frame rate and line double each field for 59.94 frames per second which should look pretty good while playing (but probably won't look quite so good with the image paused compared to something that is pre-deinterlaced).

In most cases though, these days the "distribution" format is usually going to be something like x264/H264/mp4 for best compatibility across devices. MKV is also a good container that some standalone DVD/Blu Ray players with USB ports (maybe even some Roku devices?) will play off of flash drives as well using an app like PLEX. Your other option is just to upload your Vegas output in a relatively uncompressed format to YouTube and let YouTube handle the compression and/or deinterlacing.

[Gary34]

Quote:

I've seen confusing talk that I feel is either not clear or not defined for current times about TV vs stream viewing. Which is rather misleading these days as so much of streaming is done on a TV. But I interpret it to mean at this point DVD playback to a TV vs just about everything else.

People don’t really use DVDs these days with the price of drive space being soo low. https://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/hom...r-viewing.html