Hi Sanlyn, sorry for the delay but I have been systematically replacing caps on this machine - it is taking longer than planned but I will get there eventually in the meantime, could you kindly confirm which NOISE FILTER setting I should be using on the VCR - I have three: Noise Filter ON, Noise Filter OFF and EDIT ON. I personally find the setting that gives the most vibrant colours and sharpness is the EDIT ON but not sure whether it is the right setting to use. In this mode the manual sharpness control slider is disabled. Your thoughts would be appreciated.

Set the noise filter ON or OFF. Don't use auto features like EDIT ON, mainly because such features usually oversharpen, will artificially "enhance" the image, and offers no control over what it's doing. You've been studying captures long enough now to tell if that feature is worth using.

Thanks Sanlyn - I was reading up a little on this forum and came across this thread which applies to me. Unfortunately it hasn't been fully answered but perhaps the PAL version of the AG-1980 differs to that of the NTSC one? Is there anyone who can give a definitive answer on this as I feel that EDIT ON provides a superior picture....

Link here: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/video-capture/6500-panasonic-vcr-built.html

EDIT ON leaves you with no control over any sharpening artifacts, should you see them. If you believe EDIT ON is the better position, use it.

In fact, the "EDIT" mode disables all NR/sharpening circuits so it's supposed to give the rawest, purest (as in "straightest-from-the-head") image possible, without added post-processing,

Thanks Sanlyn and tester - would you therefore recommend that EDIT ON is the mode I should use for capturing?

I'd say it very much depends on each tape and recording conditions (quality of the original signal/source, amount of noise present on playback, dropouts, etc). Panasonic "Noise filters" do certainly, by default, substract a bit of detail and add a bit of oversharpening. I personally tend to use the edit mode (or NR OFF) if possible.

Then EDIT mode with the Phillips player is similar to EDIT mode in other JVC players, which is what I suspected.


If you don't want typical softening and smearing side effects from noise reduction and don't have problems with sharpening or other enhancements, use EDIT mode. As with most such players, EDIT is designed with "straight-through" playback for dubbing from tape to tape. With EDIT mode you'll learn to recognize and filter any source noise later in post processing, which is likely more sophisticated and less destructive than with most players' built-in features. You'll have to undertake some form of post processing anyway. With tapes that aren't so noise friendly you might decide that EDIT isn't doing enough cleanup during capture. To bypass your player's more aggressive built-in image processing, use EDIT mode.

Interesting thanks both - I definitely think the colours are more richer and vibrant when using EDIT mode but there are the grainy artefacts which is basically noise which I hope can be edited out in post processing....there seems to be more detail in the picture however - I guess it is about trading off clarity with noise?

All denoising methods pose a compromise, sometimes a little, sometimes more. My AG-1980 has decent grain removal during playback but sometimes with a rally dirty tape it appears to be over-smoothing. But AG-1980 DNR can't be turned off. So I play that tape on the 1980's lesser cousin, a PV-S4670 SVHS which has so little built-in denoising it effectively has none, thus it plays a tape "as-is" without modification. This leaves me with some post processing decisions to make and more work to do. But in the long run I think that for some tapes it's better than the side effects of less sophisticated built-in denoisers. You have to decide which compromise you want to work with. One rule of thumb is that whatever is removed from an image during capture can't be magically restored later.

I never understand this. Referring to JVC decks...

I don't see smearing with NORM or AUTO*.

Softening can exist, but rarely does. EDIT vs NORM/AUTO is about equal detail. If you need more detailer, that what detailers are for (example: SignVideo DR-1000). Or the Panasonic S-VHS, which is a tad sharper, especially if you crank the slider. It sharpens by default; you see tell-tale haloing.

My question is always this: Why buy a fancy VCR only to disable all the fancy stuff you paid for? :wink2:

Only use EDIT if it can be visually proven to be causing more harm than good. But that should be a minority of the time.

* Note: NORM is with calibration off. And it should be off. If you see AUTO, it's on. Turn if off! Calibration does some bizarre things to tapes, as it tries to pre-guess tracking. And it sucks at guessing. It leads to vertical jitter more often that not.

Capturing VHS, VHS-C, and Hi8. Transferring MiniDV over Firewire cable (the right one was hard as heck to find, by the way!)

1) VHS and VHS-C with adapter: JVC SR-V101US

2) for Hi8 archival, is capturing from a camera sufficient? I have the CCD-TRV68 (specs) which I'm sure is not a great camera. But all my tapes were recorded on an early model camera with no TBC, mono audio, and no S-Video. I assume I should use these playback settings: Edit mode and DNR disabled, TBC enabled

3) Do I need an external TBC? What sort of errors should I look for to answer this question, and what issues may the JVC VCR introduce?

3) miniDV over Firewire: Scenalyzer or WinDV?

4) for archival & editing lossless format, is there any benefit to UTVideo or HuffYUV over MagicYUV?

5) Recommended resolutions: The guide here says:

352×480 = VHS, S-VHS, Hi8
640×480 = anything being captured as AVI intended for advanced editing in an NLE

So... which is it? I'm archiving but I do intend to edit, correct, etc as well.

Thanks in advance.

According to the published specs, the camera you mention has an internal tbc, likely at least a line-level tbc. Capture with the tbc enabled. You wll have to test to see if built-in dnr does what you want it to. Sometimes bult-0in dnr can overly soften or blur during motion. Built-in dnr in older gear is often rather primitive and can degrade images. Post-process apps have more sophisticated noise reduction. Many users of high-end vcr's often disable builtin-in dnr where possible and prefer to use after-capture software for less aggressive noise reduction. Tbc's aren't used during shooting. They're used for playback and capture.

External tbc's are usually frame-level rather than line-evel tbc's. A frame level tcb works on the frame timing signal, not on individual images or individual scanlines within frames. Uncorrected frame-level timing errors show up as dropped or inserted frames, frame hopping or judder, and off-sync audio. Signal noise can also generate errors that "look like" embedded copy protection errors with many capture setups -- these show up as image distortion, top-border "flashing", luminance variations, and other effects. Your camera's internal tbc might be good enough. If you have a dirty signal, you need an external tbc.

Both will work, but WinDv seems to be the overwhelming favorite.

For analog capture, people seem to have fewer problems with huffyuv. Fast and accurate, with low cpu usage during caps. Analog tape is captured as YUY2, which more closely resembles the YPbPr video storage used by analog tape. Huffyuv, Lagarith, and UT Video are in more universal use and are recognized by most media players. You can use MagicYUV, but it is optimized for high-resolution and 4K, is not as widespread in use as others, is not recognized by many media players, and many users have complaints with its use in some editors. If you use huffyuv, note that standard versions of huffyuv cannot compress YV12, used in much post-processing. Lagarith and UT Video are in wider use for post-processing. Your choice.

Unfortunately that guide is dated and was written for the CRT era, long before larger monitors were in use. See this post, and the post following: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/news...html#post50698

There is also an updated Virtualdub capture guide here, if that's what you're using: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...-settings.html

Thank you, now I know what to look out for! :)

thanks. I will try MagicYUV first, if I run into troubles I can always switch to UT Video or Huffyuv. If I get a chance I will actually compare the 3 at vhs resolutions

Quick sanity test on my Custom Format settings for Virtualdub for VHS, VHS-C, and Hi8

PAL:
720x576
YUY2


NTSC:
720x480
YUY2

Yep, you are sane. 720x480/576 YUY2 is fine. :salute:

Forgive me for asking too many questions, I grew up being filmed by this equipment and never actually used it :)

Here are some very small (<150 frames each) samples I captured then converted to x264.

Any glaring signal errors I need to clean up before I begin capturing en masse? I don't know what is typical or expected analog behavior versus errors that need to be corrected.

"analog noise rec.mkv" is noise that appears on recently recorded tape, but doesn't seem to show up when playing back video that was recorded many years ago. Is that weird, or just a sign of the age of the tapes? Other file names should be self explanatory and some are just random scenes I picked out.

Thanks for any input.


https://www.dropbox.com/sh/0ywe1fm00...WPia8XdMa?dl=0

You need an external frame-level tbc.

OK, my turn...
JVC HR-S7800U (I should be arrested for what I paid)> TBC-1000 (my wife would arrest me if she knew what I paid)>Hauppage 850 USB>32bit PowerDirector using MAGIC/Lagareth/highBR MPEG2>Windows 10x64 with i7-4770.
Thank you for this great forum.

Hope I didn't jump in too early.