Mixed VHS to Win10 computer conversion? (build feedback?)
INTRO
Hi everyone, I'm planning to convert a few hundred mixed VHS tapes—some my own, some belonging to family and friends, all probably home videos. As a wedding videographer who does my own post production, I have some equipment and experience I hope will help; that said I understand converting VHS tapes properly requires unique skill, equipment, and knowledge. Thank you dF for helping with the latter; otherwise I'd probably wind up strangling myself with the power cable of a cheap VCR. Hopefully one day I'll be able to contribute here based on experience to come. Meanwhile, I'm looking for feedback. Please let me know where I'm on the right track and where I clearly need further guidance haha: EQUIPMENT Here's what I plan to buy. External TBC and DVD recorder will only be in the chain when needed, to avoid any degradation from unnecessary devices. Everything will be powered through a CP1500PFCLCD:
One item I'm unsure about is detailers. Q6: Are detailers meant to counteract loss of detail inherent to the conversion process? I want my digital masters to be true to the source and certainly don't want "improvements" baked in. So, the only way a detailer appeals to me is if it counteracts loss of detail from conversion, and does so in a way that's superior to post-conversion digital editing. For what it's worth, I learned some thousand hours of post production ago not to overdo sharpening, etc. If this is the right tool for the job, I'll get one and use it with care. CAPTURE SYSTEM The PC I plan to use for this:
Can get another SSD for capture if needed to capture two tapes simultaneously (I'd just like to have that option), but I'm thinking 500MB/s should more than cover this. Let me know if there's any other relevant hardware I should mention. I use JBL LSR308s and a couple pairs of Sennheiser and Beyerdynamic headphones for monitoring. Moving on to software:
Because I provide my wedding clients with videos at multiple resolutions and host them on my own server, my typical process is to render final edits as uncompressed AVIs, then encode via x264 to each final output resolution. My planned workflow for VHS conversion once captured, is to keep a UT Video master, perform edits if applicable, then encode x264 as usual. Q7: Any changes you'd recommend to my capture PC? OUTRO Hope I've made this easy to read and answer. Sorry for the wall of text, but I'm hoping it'll help others to follow, and I'll keep this thread updated with my progress, experiences, successes and regrets. Thanks in advance. Edit: not sure if an admin can fix this, but I mistyped a thread keyword as "h9800u" haha. |
That Kona card is complete overkill for VHS work. Unless you really need SDI I/O and other features provided, its best to stick with a cheaper solutions for SD analog capture. Added bonus is that they almost all support DirectShow capture applications.
Regarding using AIW cards. Its perfectly acceptable to use the machine only for capture and to move the video files to a modern machine. |
Wow !i hope you get paid for this Job, all tapes are first generation ? no copies ? (must be old tapes if a camera recorded the VHS tapes directly, for live footage home movies)
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________________________________ Another edit: ugh, sorry I posted this in the wrong forum. Meant to put it in Project Planning, Workflows and no idea how I screwed up. |
What kind of 10-bit workflow are you looking at? Keep in mind that if you intend to do any editing work on your main monitor, you need a 10-bit capable video card like a nVidia Quadro (not cheap). Cards like the AJA have outputs geared towards previewing the final product such as a SDI monitor.
I would look into a separate UHD solution and buy when you have a clearer understanding of your requirements (what sources are you capturing from? Do you need HDR support? etc). Don't "overbuy" a solution that might not ever get used. |
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I have an older Philips DVDR70, which I did find to handle shitty signals well, but the OSD shows up when it thinks it lost signal for a bit, it has no level controls, can blur the image a bit and seems to be set up to mess up the image if it detects macrovision, so it's not all that usable as a TBC. I did actually make use of it once on a section of a tape though. |
The 3575 has zero TBC ability, line and frame or otherwise. It probably has a basic frame sync, and a frame sync is not a frame TBC. The 3575 is decent only with off-air signals without copy protection, and the main advantage is 16x9 (though flagged wrong at 4x3, needs manual adjustment once extracted).
Asking if a DVD recorder replaces a TBC is like asking if your push lawnmower replaces your car. Not at all the same devices. I have both TBC-3000s and the "green" 1T TBCs, each is extremely nice. I use both, and am selling a few extra 1Ts. (Be aware that a 1T is not a 1T. Most units have flawed chipsets, the ones I have do not. I have both tested and dismantled the units to verify good chips are in use.) As NJ states, don't overkill a capture system. SD and HD have very different needs, and trying to shoehorn both into the same hardware/software workflows never ends well. You make many compromises to do it. In terms of bits, VHS has probably 6-bit dithered color at best. I stated this here year ago: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...html#post25385 And that thread also discussed Aja Kona. I'll reply to the thread more, but want to address that right now. |
Thanks hodgey!
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Hope it's ok to bump after a couple days for answers/replies. :)
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Put together a separate system for capturing legacy SD (VHS/Hi8) video. Lordsmurf will recommend an ATI AIW card for an AGP slot and they're great if you can find one...but I put together a decent homebrew PCIe AIW capture system with:
Total out-of-pocket cost: Less than $150 (I already had a suitable PC which was just gathering dust; it had both SATA and IDE hard drive ports; if your machine is IDE-only then get a SATA PCI expansion card for it). And my capture results have been just great! Of course, I did invest in a couple of good VCRs and a TBC found in the marketplace on this forum. Edit To Add: The PC MUST be Windows XP, even if it's a PCIe system and not AGP. ATI never updated the drivers after Microsoft moved to Windows Vista (and, apparently, broke a lot of the essential OS functions which ATI used). Same applies with the AGP ATI cards, of course. You can find some decent USB capture devices for sale in the marketplace of this forum if you want to stay with Windows 7 or similar. I've heard that they can be made to work with W10 but I did not succeed with such after several attempts. Avoid W8 like the plague. |
Thanks ehbowen. What would I be missing out on if I used, say, a VC500 capture card with the Win10 setup I already have (assuming the rest of my capture chain as proposed)? Same question for my UMC404HD the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz.
Just trying to figure out what quantifiable advantages these devices offer. I have much to learn. |
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There's an old saying: "The proof of the pudding is in the eating." I've got three clips here, all cut from the original unprocessed captures. The first one was rendered to mp4 because it was captured as a transport stream file (DVD format) using a Hauppauge HVR-2250 capture card under Windows 10 in January 2017, before I ever found this forum, and I don't have software for directly editing a .ts video file. So I entered it into Corel VideoStudio and rendered the clip as an SD mp4. The second clip is the exact same source tape captured 22 months later with the same VCR (Mitsubishi HS-HD2000U; great machine!) but this time using a TBC-4000 for better frame sync and the ATI AIW X1800 homebrew system I cobbled together as per the other thread. No processing of any kind, just copy of the original AVI capture stream using the HuffyUV codec. Finally, I have an unrelated source clip, of the Reagan 1984 inaugural gala and Donna Summer performing with the US Naval Academy glee club. I "just happened" to be a member of the USNA glee club at the time; my parents taped the show (in EP mode, on an el cheapo T-160 cassette, over previous on-air recordings) and I found the tape 34-1/2 years later. The wedding tape was likewise EP, a copy of a copy made by a friend of a friend who videoed my sister's wedding...that's her wearing the white; she's now a mother of eight and grandmother of three with more very likely to come. So take a look at the clips and make your own determination...but be advised that this isn't the whole story. Remember, these clips are completely unprocessed. Someone like sanlyn who knows his post-processing cold could probably do quite a bit with the two lossless clips, even considering the bad source material they came from. On the other hand, I'll bet you a cold soda that he'd throw up his hands and refuse to have anything to do with the first clip, even if he had it in its as-captured .ts file format. |
Ah thank you! I'll be poring over this for a while haha. I realized after posting that some of my questions might seem snarky or skeptical, but I'm really trying to fill in blanks and that's a big help so again, thank you!
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By the way, as regards the sound card: You want a sound card to take the load of processing the audio off of the PC's CPU; for a Windows XP-spec machine just processing the video is really all you want to give it at one time. The Turtle Beach is the recommendation of forum owner and all-around guru Lordsmurf, but I've had good results with a pair of ASUS Xonar DGXs (one in a PCI slot on an AGP/PCI machine; one in a PCIe slot on my PCIe capture machine).
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Capping VHS to lossy h.264 with an HDPVR is a bad idea if you want to get into restoration. h.264 is not designed for modification, and the HDPVR for SD uses too low a bitrate for further work with lossy encodes of VHS source. Quote:
BTW I have a boatload of .ts captures made with my HDPVR, both SD and HD, and I pretty well got accustomed to their properties when working with them, even with not-so-great SD sources over digital cable. But VHS is another story. The first thing I learned early on was to never capture VHS with an HDPVR. I had some pretty bad tapes and bad cable signals, almost all of which were "workable" with the VCR's and ATi AIW's I used for capture (players and 7500 and 9600XT AIW's made a huge difference in capture quality). I even had a CMT tape that had FM noise during cable transmission. But none of those tapes looked as bad as the gala tape -- but we have seen plenty of bad tapes around here, and many that were worse. I gave the AVI's a try, if for no other reason than to demonstrate that bad tape and unwanted colorspace conversions impose serious limits on restorations. The attached filtered versions could definitely use more time and tweaks. I wouldn't consider them "final", but I think they're near the point of diminishing returns. And you're right -- I wouldn't invest time in the HDPVR version, especially since it should have been avoided in the first place. What you first notice about tape dupes like the wedding tape, other than the ugly noise, is the disappearance of fine detail and texture. Then there's the color issues and ugly effects like overly dark eye sockets and black mouths. In the ladies' hair you can see black blobs of crushed darks. The wedding tape also has ugly interlace effects, not because interlacing is bad in itself but because of the nth-generation condition. One of those players had bad heads. Take a look at the notches and other edge defects in the image below. It's a 2X blowup of part of a deinterlaced frame (it's the edge of a mirror on the left, and the edge of a white closet door frame on the right). http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...1&d=1553232572 The notches in that image change with every frame, so you have all that buzzing noise on edges every time something moves. I managed to smooth some of them, but they'll never go away or remain stable. The fixed 29.97i DVD version looks better, but the best fix was deinterlacing and discarding alternate fields for the 4x3 progressive mp4 (which I also resized to square-pixel format for web mounting). It's unlikely that the same filters and settings could be used in every shot, especially with the wedding tape. That's common with home videos and even with many retail tapes. For one thing, whatever is shot in different lighting will have different noise patterns, and different color and levels problems. These samples are also rather short, probably because of the size increase caused by RGB conversion. |
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