Let's say you have a pristine VHS tape that you want to capture. Assuming endless money is there a way of capturing that you feel would be visibly/audibly obviously better -vs- capturing through a camcorder or other pass-thru device to DV avi? Or does DV avi capture everything there is to capture?
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DV will always show some loss regardless of the quality and price of your analog chain. The real-world tradeoff is convenience and simplicity vs. "not much" quality loss.
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You might actually, just about, see a difference if the final output is upscaled HD at a decent bitrate.
You will see a difference if you get the levels wrong going into the DV device, but set them properly on the other capture device.
If you really want to throw money at the problem, better S-VHS machines for the source are the way to go, if you can find them. There's even a couple that don't include head switching noise at the bottom of the picture (depending on the source).
There's also the "getting the things copied at all today while they still play" vs "waiting ten years to do it perfectly, and then finding the tapes have deteriorated, or there's no decent playback equipment, or..." - and some people would say that we're already in that second situation today.
Cheers,
David. -
I'm in the midst of capturing several hundred folk, country and bluegrass VHS tapes, both commercial (ones that have not been released on DVD) and my own. I'm using S-VHS decks (PAL & NTSC), plus a LaserDisc player, capturing and enhancing with a BlackMagic Teranex (with a time base corrector and BlackMagic Analog to SDI converter in the chain). I'm then editing in Final Cut Pro X, and editing audio in DSP Quattro. Although the quality of the commercial VHS tapes varies enormously, it's giving very good results.
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Apple ProRes 422HQ. Capturing to a Thunderbolt external drive, maxed out Retina iMac.
I find the Teranex works very well now. When initially released, many features were not implemented, but the current firmware and software allows full control, and the ability to do virtually any form of upscaling, aspect ratios etc etc makes it an incredibly useful device if one can warrant the cost. -
Do we really have to have another thread on this sme question?
Same answer. Analog to DV is doo-doo. Get y'self a Panasonic AG-1980 (pro shop rebuild, anywhere from $400 to $1000), then supplement that for misbehaving tapes with a reconditioned Panasonic SVHS non-tbc VCR with s-video out and Dynamorphous heads from 1995-1996 and a DMR-ES10/ES15 for pass thru, and a lossless ATI AGP or ATI-clone capture device, cap to huffyuv or Lagarith lossless YUY2 AVI, clean it up with Avisynth/VirtualDub, encode it into your choice of final delivery formats, and burn (or send to drive storage). That means one and only one lossy encode. One. Only.
Have we heard all this before? We sure have.
DV fans can go ahead and pounce, but it won't change anything. We've seen enough mosquito noise and sparkly edges to last a lifetime.- My sister Ann's brother
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