First of all thanks a ton for such an incredible site - the information assembled here is priceless. So anyway I'm embarking on the project of transferring 40+ VHS tapes of my childhood, over to digital storage. Ultimately I'd like to keep both an archive quality set of files (lossless, high bitrate), and a convenient set of files (h.264 maybe) for uploading, sharing, etc.

The only VCR I currently have is a crappy Quasar unit, so I have on order a Panasonic AG-1980 which claims to have been recently refurbished with new capacitors and also functionally tested (we'll see...). The reason I chose this model, is since most of the tapes in the collection *should* be SLP or EP. My current VCR won't display the mode but I'm fairly certain remembering back to my childhood, that my dad always tried to squeeze as much onto each tape as possible.

So my real question at the moment, is what to use for a transfer device on a modern (no AGP) PC. I've seen the recommendations on the site here to use an ATI 600 USB stick. I have sitting next to me a Dazzle DVC100 that my father in law loaned me to mess around with. Would both of these devices be fairly equivalent, or would I certainly be better off picking up an ATI 600 USB? Also would there be any real reason to get an ATI 600 or 650 PCIe card instead, or is the 600 USB plenty good for most purposes?

Thanks!

BTW: I know I left out any mention of a TBC, and I'm still doing my homework in that area...

-- merged --

I did a bit of tinkering tonight so I figured I'd post an update. I installed the drivers for the DVC100 and a copy of Virtualdub. Everything just worked out of the box, I could select the Dazzle DVC100 in Virtualdub and begin a capture just fine. The data rate was showing up as about 18MB/sec uncompressed and about 9MB/sec using Huffyuv compression.

Does this mean the DVC100 is passing an uncompressed bitstream through to the PC, or is something deceptive going on like it's sending an MPEG compressed stream and I can't tell with my limited knowledge? :)

I'm not sure about audio yet, since the tape I tested with has no audio (it was a DIY 8mm to VHS transfer my dad did).

Even if this is all working, would I still see benefit in buying any of the other cards I mentioned in my original post? Thanks!

Welcome to the forum. :salute:

It's a good thing you have a better machine on the way! Some years back, I started out with cheap vcr's. It almost turned me completely off to capturing. And I had more than 40 tapes (I had over 1500 hours of VHS recordings. Figure that out at mostly EP tapes).

No way. Forget Dazzle. Don't even think about it. Three things to avoid: Dazzle, Pinnacle, Cyberlink. Stay with ATI and similar stuff from Diamond Multimedia.

Quasar, Dazzle? No line tbc, no frame tbc? Many use the term "working" to mean they can see an image. If it moves, even better. It depends on the quality you're looking for. Others who've been through a transfer and restoration or two would mention so many things wrong and/or missing, you might hide under your bed and never attempt another capture, LOL! Anyway, glad you're getting results so far. An ATI/AG-1980 setup should be no less difficult, but with much cleaner results. You're talking about gear and methods that are a world apart.

If you can find an old XP PC with an AGP board (or build one yourself while components are still around), then add an All In Wonder AGP 7500, 9600, etc. (or spend 4 figures plus tax to get something better), you'll really be firing all cylinders. But the ATI 600 series and a good VCR will still take you a long way from where you are now.

I'm not sure about the "data rate", as I've never kept track of it. If what you mean is bitrate, a huffyuv compressed YUY2 AVI usually shows up at about 46mbps bitrate. Can't tell you about uncompressed -- I've never captured uncompressed video that I can recall. VirtualDub capture doesn't encode to MPEG. If you want to see some stats on your capture, try the free standalone edition of MediaInfoXP (http://www.videohelp.com/software/MediaInfoXP). Don't be thrown off if MediaInfo sometimes reports a YUY2 colorspace as "RGB", depending on the structure of the AVI's header info. But otherwise it's a handy little app. Avisynth has an "info" command that tells you other interesting stuff. If you want someone to have a look, post a few seconds of unprocessed captured AVI. Make a short 8-second cut in VitualDub and save it using "direct stream copy". 8-secs of huffyuv YUY2 shouldn't be bigger than 50 or 60 MB or so.

Thanks for all the feedback! I guess when I said everything "working" I was just referring to the Dazzle capture device. Meaning if it looks like it's working fine with Virtualdub, is an ATI 600 USB still going to be beneficial to me. It sounds like the answer is yes.

As a followup to that question, is there a notable difference between the 600 USB and PCIe version? I understand they use different chipsets, but they always seem to be lumped together in discussions on the site.

As far as TBCs go, I will most definitely be using them. The deck has a good field-TBC built in from what I understand, and I'd like to find a TBC-100 to buy as my frame-TBC. I just can't find any TBC-100 (or TBC-1000) units for sale at the moment. :(

I guess I do have one question on TBC use though. Should the TBC on the Panasonic be left on for all transfers unless I see it causing problems? Or should it be left off, and then enabled only to fix specific problems? The same question applies for the TBC-100 as well. I've seen some members mention that the frame TBC should NOT be used unless it seems to be required, since removing one more device should reduce degradation of the signal being sent from the deck to the capture device. Just a little confused. :P

You have to make short test captures and check the results. If you don't know what you're looking for, you can post a sample and let folks here have a look. Yes, sometimes an outboard tbc can do more harm than good, but turning off the line tbc is usually not a good idea unless that AG-1980 is tracking perfectly. Turning off the 1980 TBC also turns off noise reduction. It's sometimes not necessary for an outboard frame tbc, but only a capture itself can tell. A line tbc corrects field timing within frames, and the 1980 will try to output a clean frame stream. A frame tbc can sometimes be a problem, but it's purpose is to insure exact frame timing without dropped frames.

Because I use a pass-thru DVD machine for capture, the pass-thru unit has elementary frame sync -- not as strong as a real tbc, but good enough to avoid audio sync problems and to destroy macrovision. For really godawful tape, I use my old AVT-8710 -- still working (knock wood). There are some occasions where the highest-end VCR's can give odd results. It's almost always the tape's fault, not the player. Ergo, along comes one of my non-tbc legacy spare VCRs -- which means more cleanup work, but sometimes it's the only way. If you run into a real problem tape, before you spend a ton of loot on more gear for just a few crumby tapes contact the staff here and they might be able to economically get you a decent capture. They have more equipment than you can shake a stick at (I'm envious).

While every tape capture has similarities in problems and operation, many tapes just don't behave and pose different glitches. Only a capture can tell.

And, yes, you'll get better results with the USB unit, the PCI as second choice but still better than Dazzle.

Really good guidance, thanks again! I'll pick up the USB 600 version as a starting point and see how I like it. I'm terrified of buying an AVT-8710 since it seems like there are more negative reports than positive reports in recent years. :/

- I would wait for a TBC-1000 or another DataVideo TBC to appear on eBay.
- The new AG-1980 VCR should be good, hoping that it has no bad caps. (And if so, send it to TGrant to repair.)
- The ATI 600 USB would be an upgrade over the Dazzle.

Leave a VCR TBC turned on as much as possible. It's needed in probably 95%+ of capture scenarios. When it's causingf more harm than good, that other 5% or less, you'll know it.

Building an XP system, with an ATI AIW AGP/PCI for capture, is really the best solution. (If interested, I have some extras that I'd sell. These are fully working systems, everything you'd need is here, just plug it in and start capturing. A few even have TBC, studio speakers, and VCR included.)

Ok so I'm back after a bit of a delay, and I've had a bit of success. :) I thought it would be prudent however, to post a quick sample and let the pros pick it apart to find any room for improvement.

The current setup is this:

• Windows 7 x64 PC
• ATI USB 600 Capture Device
• AVT-8710 TBC (Default settings but locked to NTSC)
• Panasonic AG-1980 SVHS Deck for VHS Captures
• Sony DCR-TRV740 for Hi8 and D8 Captures (Firewire for D8 and SVideo for Hi8)
• WinDV for D8 Transfers, and VirtualDub 1.10.4-x64 + HuffYUV x64 for VHS and Hi8 Captures

Transferring the Digital8 tapes has been a no-brainer. WinDV works great on this computer, but I still have to work out some kinks in my workflow. Virtualdub seems to complain when trimming the files using a direct stream copy on the DV encoded files. AVIDemux seems to work slightly better.

For the analog captures, I thought I had things going well and then I realized the audio was out of sync by 1/4 to 1/2 second. I tweaked some Vdub settings for the I/O Cache and capture timing; now everything seems to be synced up. On the AG-1980 I have the TBC enabled and the picture setting just to the soft side of the detent. Maybe 45% of the way up the scale is a good way to quantify it. I basically just tried moving it towards soft until I couldn't make out any "outlines" around high contrast edges.

So yeah, that's pretty much where I'm at. I've attached a quick sample of a VHS capture and would love to hear what you all think of the result.

Next up I need to tackle how to encode the captures into deinterlaced h.264 for convenient use on our computers and sharing digitally with family.

Thanks again for all of the help thus far!!!

I'm also seeing an interesting sort of noise/effect on one tape I just captured. I'm curious if anyone has seen anything like it, and if there's any known filter to take care of this sort of stuff.

Take a look at the attached file, specifically at the curtain on the right side of the frame. You'll see there are diagonal lines sort of watermarking the whole image. I tried turning the TBC on the deck off, and also tried removing the AVT-8710 from the cabling, but the lines are always there. This footage would have been filmed in the mid 1980s and may or may not be a copy of a copy - not sure. :)

Thanks!

Thank you for the sample. You'd be amazed at the disasters that get posted as early caps, so you seem to have a leg up on the process. It's never perfect the fist time (mine sure weren't!!!), but congrats on getting off to a good start.

For your fist sample you picked an example of something that's fairly common but tough to work. Only two problems to worry about. The first is CMOS noise. You see CMOS noise when the strength of the signal you're recoding is equal to or less than the strength of the camera's residual noise level. The noise you see in the clip is processor noise. You'll notice something very odd about it: watch the video play but don't focus on anything except the noise itself. When objects "under" the noise level move, the noise stays pretty much in place. It moves with the camera. The problem with noise that doesn't change very much is that denoisers don't detect most of it as noise. Another problem is motion: if the noise has very little motion but objects under it are moving around, denoisers get even more confounded.

Likely the CMOs stuff won't go away, although it can be minimized and thinned out somewhat. I didn't get very far with that for now, but on to the second problem. Question to ask is, how bright is this scene supposed to be? All the blacks are low-middling gray, and the noise and high gamma make the clip look foggy and washed out. It's true that home VHS (and retail, too) change levels at a moment's notice, so maybe this series of shots was difficult to set levels for. The clip has very high gamma and elevated black levels. A side effect of incorrectly set high black levels is that white levels are high, too...in this case, brights are just past the point of getting blown away. If the cameras moves on to brighter areas of this event, brights and highlights will lose detail. You can soften more during capture,m but the noise will persist. The first things to disappear with softening will be parts of the guitar strings.

Below are three pics, all from, frame 195. Borders were cropped off so they wouldn't affect the histogram. In the top image you see a YUV histogram on the right that measures luma levels. Luma in the histogram is the top white graph. The white has its left-end, darkest point at about RGB 50 or so, which is a gray that's too light to pass for black or dark shadow. At its rightmost end, the white sneaks into the "unsafe" shaded area, where brights are clipped when displayed as RGB. Look at the bright highlight on the edge of the tile counter to the right of the figure's head. It's losin detail, and changing color from tan to orange. The preferred "legal" luminance range inside the shaded portions of the histograms represent RGB 16-235.
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...1&d=1438309353

Below, frame 195 after levels adjustment in Avisynth. Compare detail in the right-edge counter tile and in the empty plate on the counter top with the same objects in the above image. With better blacks, the image takes on more depth. The histogram's luma bar is within the safe range. Better, but needs tweaking and everything is too green.
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...1&d=1438309497

Below, the final results after tweaking YUV adjustments in VirtualDub and RGB. Still not perfect (welcome to VHS!), but has a more believable 3D look and convincing skin tones and hair color. The RGB histogram from VirtualDub's ColorTools plugin shows a more dynamic and realistic luma and color range.
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...1&d=1438309666

I did some denoising before copying the above image to the clipboard in VirtualDub. CMOS junk is a real headache and will take some experimentation later.
Why are you deinterlacing? PC media players can deinterlace as well as your TV and set top player can. Unless you're using Windows Media Player, which is at the low end of the playback game. Or VLC, which by default doesn't deinterlace but can be set for it. All other decent players like MPC-BE, MPC-HC, MPC, etc., deinterlace well.

Before you ship off a bunch of h264 encodes to relatives, check which of your folks have BluRay players for playing them. DVD is still the universally sharable format and will be around for a long time. DVD is interlaced. If you have standard definition BluRay/AVCHD in mind, those formats are also interlaced and can be encoded with h264 or MPEG (MPEG handles interlace and telecine better). If you get crazy and try to upscale to 1920x1980 for BluRay (I wouldn't), that format at 29.97fps is also interlaced. You can always make nonstandard MPEG, BluRay AVCHD, or mp4, etc., but take your chances on equipment that can play it. Set tops don't work like PC media software.

Deinterlacing is best done in Avisynth and will result in a 59.94 frame rate. If you use frame blending to deinterlace for 29.97, you'll have ugly blurry pictures and poor motion handling. If you deinterlace for 29.97fps by discarding alternate fields, you'll have motion stutter and will throw away 50% of your original resolution. Standard definition BluRay/AVCHD and DVD cannot use double frame rates and cannot be authored to disc with non-spec frame rates. What you can do is deintelace with QTGMC to double frame rates and encode to mp4, which can be played by many external players and some BluRay players. In any case, you should familiarize yourself with things like GOP size limits, bitrate factors, and a few other things that can affect performance, quality, and compatibility.

Good start. I'll try to get some suggestions on how to struggle with that CMOS stuff.

Holy cow, thanks for spending so much time analyzing the sample - this is awesome feedback.

As far as the noise goes, I think I just sort of wrote it off as expected for such an old camera. I've done a lot of digital photography work and sort of saw the evolution of noisy sensors to very smooth ones, and also the filters available to de-noise still photos. I have zero experience with it though on video, so I'll just have to start playing around with whatever options are out there I guess. To be honest, noise doesn't bug me too much in the grand scheme of things.

For the gamma and black levels, I guess I might need some guidance on how to attack this in my workflow. I don't have any adjustments dialed in anywhere (unless I'm not seeing something that is hidden), so this should be pretty much how the camera shot it. I don't know if maybe there was a gain knob on the camera that was turned up too high maybe? Anyway, these tapes I'm capturing are for the most part composed of dozens or hundreds of individual clips that my dad shot at various times. Some of the clips may even be dubs from other tapes from friends etc (can't really tell). It would be a monumental task to go through and individually correct each clip.

I'm mostly inclined to capture one file per tape, and do the best I can to create a solid digital archive of the tapes. If I want to use or share a specific clip from the tape then I can export it individually and clean it up on-demand. Is this sort of approach possible? I guess the big question is whether I should be tweaking the black levels, gamma, and color with proc amp settings in hardware, or is it something I should be tackling after the fact in software?

Thanks!

In VirtualDub capture click 'Video" -> "Levels...", and hook into the basic proc amp controls on your 9600XT. Brightness and contrast are all you'll need, really. What most people do after a little experience is set up a worst case scenario for a tape's entire length -- that is, you know you have some very dark stuff and some overly bright stuff coming, so set brightness (black levels) and contrast (bright levels) to keep the left and right extremes "out of the red" for most of a tape. Somewhere you might hit 5 minutes where levels are just whacko for that one section. if they're too bad, you can re-capture that short segment. Don't use any of the other filters or denoisers; others work only in RGB and you'll have to hassle with a double color conversion, others are too slow.

"Out of the red" refers to the left (dark) and right (bright) extremes of VirtualDub's capture histogram. Turn on "Preview" and "histogram" to use, but not during capture. Remember that borders are black and will almost always be in the far left red . You can also go into "crop" and cut the borders off to get a better histogram view.

And please, if you use crop -- do not forget to set all crop parameters back to zero and turn off cropping! Take it from one who learned the hard way. :wall1:

Concepts of gamma, white balance, gray balance, black balance, overextended luma and chroma, crushed darks, clipped brights, saturation, color casts for video are the same as for photography. Movies are streams of still images.

None of us use any physical media, so basically all viewing and sharing will be done with google drive, dropbox, etc. Most of which have built in video players, and I suspect they're mostly set up for playing back modern progressive content but I could be wrong.

For automatic deinterlacing, how do the players know when to deinterlace? When I play back these HuffYUV captures (like my samples) in VLC, I have to manually enable deinterlacing. The auto mode does nothing. Is there a flag it's looking for, or is it just scanning the video frames for evidence of interlacing?

I do have a ton to learn about encoding for h264 though - I've dabbled in it before and there are way too many settings and options haha.

Just a minor correction, it's an ATI USB 600 in this case. Not a 9600XT. I also am noticing something really weird in Virtualdub. When I enable the histogram with Overlay enabled, the histogram shows up but is frozen. When I enable it with Preview enabled, the video preview windows goes away and all I can see is a functional histogram. So I have either video, or histogram, but not both simultaneously haha. I feel like the bugs in Virtualdub were designed to be as much of a pain in the ass as possible. :)

There's nothing "modern" about interlaced or deinterlaced/progressive. It's just different. And both have existed for decades, and both will continue to coexist in the future. Deinterlacing content is generally a bad idea, and is only suggested in a few scenarios (and only as a copy to the original interlaced content).

I want to read this thread, and quite a few others, in more detail soon. But I saw this, and had to respond to it.

You are. If they can only play progressive input, they can't play the following formats:
- Hollywood films on DVD and SD-BluRay/AVCHD are not progressive. They're either interlaced with some studios crazy method or other technique, or telecined. Most current prime time TV shows in SD and HD are telecined or interlaced.
- They can't play any movie or show that isn't 24fps or 23.97 fps and isn't purely progressive.
- They can't play many BluRay-compliant HD home camera videos from memory cards or burned to disk or on USB drives or copied to player drives, because a great many of those videos are shot at interlaced 25i or 30i for BluRay compliance.
- There's other stuff they can't play, but It's getting late..
- ...And since most HD broadcasts are interlaced or telecined, I guess those units can't play copy-free HD videos recorded on your Hauppauge HD-PVR or similar gadgets.

Players read file header info that has instructions for playback. VLC isn't my prime player, I used it to see how videos will look when played by others with it. See "Tools" -> "Preferences" -> "Video" -> "Deinterlace", set to Auto and choose bob or yadif as interlace method. Both are used by Avisynth and VirtualDub. Avisynth's QTGMC is much better but is for high-end repair and restoration and too slow for real-time.

Most of the time i use TMPGenc Mastering Works. It does check to make cure I make "legal" DVD/BluRay.

Except for web use, deinterlace is a lot of work for very little return. Few NLE's deinterlace cleanly or correctly, including "pro" stuff from Vegas and Adobe. Deinterlacing always has a cost; motion-compensated interpolation and specialized resizing methods are required to do it correctly. Proceed at your own risk.

One other quick question... How the heck did you get the histograms to show up in AviSynth? I'm just starting to experiment with it, but when I create a script like the following:

I get this error in my video player: "Histogram: Levels mode only available in PLANAR"

-- merged --

Hmmm....

You can ignore my last question. :) Figured out that I needed to convert to YV12 before the histogram would work, and also had to install a YV12 codec for Windows 7 in order for Windows Media Player to play the script output.

Yes, I caught that later, but too late to change the post (I think an hour after original post is the limit). That's what I get for posting on one PC and trying to end a capture on the other. Multitasking: not my thing.

Agreed. But I consider that VDub works with many capture cards since at least Windows 95, maybe earlier. Not even Premiere Pro can say that. With that particular feature it acts one way with my 9600XT and another with my ancient 7500. With one card I don't hear audio until I enable audio capture and audio playback at the same time. But I get an echo that's also in the capture file with both turned on, so I disable audio playback but leave audio capture on -- no echo, and the capped sound is OK. Beats me.

For some reason, levels mode is YV12 only. The chroma section of that histogram is only an approximation (putting it kindly). You can have OK luma but in RGB some colors could be off the chart (usually red). The ColorTools RGB histogram I pictured doesn't work in Win7 (another reason to upgrade to XP, LOL!). Imperfect systems, yes. Now that you mention it, looks like Microsoft took a break from ruining their browsers to do the same for Media Player, which hasn't worked since early Windows 98. WMP hardly plays anything and often ignores aspect ratios. You might try one of its descendants, either Media Player Classic (MPC) or MPC-BE. Except for some oddball web stuff, MPC still holds its own. The codec utility that seems to work with everything as opposed to k-lite (which snags every machine it touches) is ffdshow installed with defaults. ffdshow has its own version of huffyuv, which you should disable in ffdshow's config dialog. The free haali media splitter is sometimes needed for some containers.

It's getting such that it ain't so easy these days to just play a video. That's one reason for staying in the neighborhood of standard formats and encoding.

I gave the Tape1 samplea try with Avisynth and Virtualdub, trying all sorts of tricks with both. My idea was to minimize the CMOS noise without getting rid of it 100%. Not that 100% or close to it isn't possible. It's just that there wouldn't be much video left to watch. I attached three sample attempts as A, B, C. Each starts with the same Avisynth script and VDub filters (A). "B" is the same thing, but double frame rate 480p (and progressive had little or no effect on how you see the noise). "C" adds more filters -- and removes more detail, along with starting to look a little weird and unreal.

Filtering began by removing the bright pink rainbow and "flashes" from the top border. This usually works best if done first, before anything else. The chubbyrain2 sequence calls the original frames "a", filters the "a" image and crops off the bottom 224 pixels and saves the filtered version as "b", then overlays a with b. Versions "A" and "B" of the final video use this script:
The RGB filters used in Virtualdub were gradation curves and the built-in temporal smoother. I also attached a VirtualDub .vcf file with the filter setup and settings. A .vcf is a text file you can read in Notepad (I wouldn't edit anything, or it probably won't work). At VDub run time, use "Fiel..." -> "Load processing settings", naviagte to the vcf file, and select and load it. The filters and the settings I used will magically appear in the filter chain, assuming you have a gradation curve filter in your Virtualdub plugins. The temporal smoother is builtin. Loading a .vcf is convenient, but remember that loading it will unload any previous filters in the chain. VirtualDub's output was saved to YV12 for the encoder using lossless Lagarith compression.

The "C" version attached adds one of the many additional filters I tried. In this case it used the interlaced results from "A", broke it into 3 parts to make it look as if the slow-moving CMOS noise had more "motion", then rejoined the parts. It did remove more bif blotches of grain. It also removed a lot of other stuff you probably want to keep instead of making the video look plastic. I tried other strong filters that had even more bizarre effects, down to making the guitar look like something made from ABS plastic and the player looking like Jello mold.

The "C" script added this little trick:
"A" and "C" were encoded with TMPGenc Plus 2.5, "B" with TMPGenc Mastering Works 5.

Apologies for taking so long to respond to your last post - work has been pretty busy and my VHS tinkering time hasn't really been there. Didn't want you to think you spent all that time for no reason though. :) Once I get through my initial captures I'll work on learning more about the restoration process and the steps you mentioned.

In the meantime though, I've had a few other weird capture issues come up in the past 24 hours though and I think I'll post them in new threads to keep the search feature relevant on the site. :)

I pretty much avoid trimming DV, and just recompress then to Huffyuv. As you've seen, there can be issues with the integrity of the transferred stream. It's the camera's fault.

I never used VirtualDub with Windows 95. But it's been fine with 98, 98SE, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 7 and 8.

Yeah, one lesson at a time. Capture first, restore next. :)