Missing info in Cloner Alliance Box Pro reviews?
 

Something I haven't seen in Cloner Alliance Box Pro Reviews...

I've watched quite a few Cloner Alliance Box Pro reviews since it seems to be one of the more decent all in one modern capture solutions given that it can record at a bitrate of 22Mb/s, records at 60FPS, and can add 4:3 pillarbars for correct aspect ratio in a 16:9 frame. Where it is known to be lacking is not being exactly at 59.94fps for analog NTSC video, no option to capture as a 4:3 file (like 1440x1080 without pillarboxing) and you're stuck with live MP4 compression with 1080p upscaling. I think their upscaling/deinterlacing is actually pretty decent compared to other MP4 capture devices and most consumers would be happy with that part.

However, in the probably 10+ reviews I've watched, I hadn't seen anything mentioned about the degree of zoom/cropping it does which is immediately noticeable on the sides if you run a pattern into the composite input. SMPTE bars should all be the same width and you can see that both of the side bars are much narrower than they should be due to being zoom/cropped. I'd estimate it at right about 10% of the total horizontal information is just gone. Here's a capture directly from a color bar generator via composite along with copy/pasted bars that show how far out the bars would go if they weren't zoom/cropped:

Attachment 20037

I have an older unit for testing which may not have the newest firmware and probably isn't the newest hardware revision since mine says "HDML" on top instead of "cloner" - but I doubt they changed how the zoom capture works in the newer versions.

Since this is a zoomed capture, there's also some information missing from the top and bottom of the frame also but that's not quite as noticeable in practice because you'll often have head switching noise for VHS in particular that you'd probably prefer not to see anyway. Probably a bonus since most flagging occurs at the very top, and cropping the sides makes it harder to see if there are minor line timing errors. To be fair, when the original content was being displayed on CRTs, you probably wouldn't see all of the side information due to overscan, but seems a waste not to capture that information if it's present.

I then went over to VWestLife's review of his Cloner Alliance Box Pro (his also is one of the older ones that says "HDML" on top) and then compared to the same footage capturing used in his Sony DVD recorder review. I found the same scene used in both reviews and then used YouTube to set them to the same video frame just before a scene transition. Both of the videos on his channel are just live videos of a screen (so don't pay attention to contrast/color/brightness), but you can clearly see just how much the Cloner Alliance is cropping from each side. That's the amount of information you lose by using it at least for analog capture. See below for a more "real world" example of how much information the cloner is losing per vwestlife's testing. Cloner is on the left:

Attachment 20039


My guess is that HDMI and VGA does not capture zoom/cropped, but I'll need to do some more testing for sure. The way around this information loss is most likely to use a DVD recorder that can upscale/deinterlace and also outputs HDMI and then just use the HDMI input of the Cloner Alliance Box. To be fair, I do see why many users would want to do some degree of zoom cropping, but unfortunately this does not appear to be user-settable as far as I can tell.

Yes, that's why they are not recommended, they don't adhere to any standard, wrong frame rate, wrong levels, bad chroma, Unnecessary cropping, In fact you should avoid any capture device that de-interlaces and encodes on the fly, The original ADC chip may be working within the standard but the processing that comes after is screwing it all up.

I don't know how much the current version of the Cloner Box has changed since the older version I tested in 2019. I asked them if I could update the firmware on mine, and they said that was not possible because the hardware is different.

At least on the one I tested, it not only crops off the edges of the image, it also loses detail and oversaturates the colors. See the direct comparison at 12:36: Cloner Alliance Cloner Box Pro with 60fps VHS video capture review & test

Just for the heck of it, I opened the captured sample I attached in the first post in Davinci Resolve and it looks like it is pretty good in terms of luma levels (and does capture sub black (sub 7.5IRE) for NTSC), but the chroma/hue is off for green/cyan/red/magenta. Actual saturation levels look ok for all colors on this unit anyway. I'm curious if going through an upscaling HDMI DVD recorder does better, will have to give that a go:

Attachment 20041

Attachment 20040

I might have to see if it's possible to change any hue settings within the capture box, but I feel like that is likely to bring blue and yellow out of alignment as most hue adjustments will rotate the entire waveform. What you'd really need is separate color levels I think. Technically, if using something like Resolve, you could make a "LUT" (lookup table) to apply to all of your Cloner Alliance box captures even if the original capture is wrong. Not that I pretend to be an expert in any of this haha, but thought it was worth a post.

I think I'm going to return this box (since it crops way more than expected) and then get the newer one which might have some improvements since this one can't get updated firmware either apparently, hopefully with some improvements in color accuracy

To be fair, I've done no similar testing on non-SDI devices, so I don't know how good or bad this really is in the scheme of things in terms of color accuracy in particular. I do plan to test something like 15 or 20 different devices though in these same ways - luma/chroma accuracy, cropping check, vectorscope/waveform monitor for SMPTE bars.

It could also be that the unit does ok with super stable color burst made from a pattern generator or DVD player, but maybe it doesn't with analog tapes. I'll have to check that with a recording of color bars as well for each device.

What a coincidence, I've also captured the same contents.

The Cloner box sample image above also looks to have wrong aspect ratio, stretched too wide by a %.