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  1. Member Ennio's Avatar
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    Hi everybody

    A friend of mine and me are (finally) planning to capture our music collection of VHS, S-VHS and Betamax tapes. All PAL and NTSC. Some unique footage was recorded anamorphically through a PAL-Plus decoder. For (S-)VHS in NTSC we want to use the US model Panasonic AG-7350. We have a Panasonic NV-FS88 S-VHS recorder (european model) which we intend to use for PAL. Both machines are still in good condition. There is also this SONY betamax recorder, we gotta try out if it still plays good though.

    When capturing was new to me years ago, I bought a Plextor ConvertX PX-M402U. This one does DivX and dvd-compliant MPEG2. Having some issues with this device, I guess nowadays there may be better capture-devices.

    Our thought is to put the videos on BD. I am not sure if it is possible to capture analog tapes and save the streams directly as an uncompressed file (will be big, my guess) and later encoding it into H264. Maybe there are capturing devices with decent AVC encoding-hardware onboard one can directly import in BD authoring software?

    Another issue is that this guy with whom I'm doing this also has some footage on a Samsung Digital HDTV Recorder on which' harddisk I spent weeks to try and retrieve the original streams from. Alas, no luck. We can of course playback these programs and try to capture via HDMI, but then HDCP is an issue. Here I've read a workaround for the AVerTV HD DVR. Don't know if there are more ways for other hardware. Also Macrovision issues can pop up trying to capture original tapes, my guess.

    In the past I encountered A/V sync issues with the Plextor and have read many of similair cases during analog capturing. Advice on how to tackle this issue is appreciated.

    Anyways, we want to invest in a proper capturing set-up. Preferably with all analogue inputs (audio, composite, S-VHS and component) and HDMI input. An external device would be handy, not a must though. What device do you recommend?

    I read a lot good stuff about the usage of a time base corrector. If that's what we need we'll go look for one.

    We can use advice on properly capturing of analog tapes workflow in general. But also on hardware. What type of TBC or other stuff to look for. What software to use. If info about the used pc's is wanted, please say so.


    Thanks in advance all

    Ennio
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  2. Member Cornucopia's Avatar
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    Here's an overview of how I would set this up:

    (devices)->Hardware device switch (Composite/S Video+Audio)->TBC (one that can remove Macrovision problems) with ProcAmp->Analog Capture card (convert to Uncompressed/Lossless digital file).

    Edit, Save master as Lossless/VisuallyLosslessLossy, then save copy that is either 2pass VBR or Quality-based h.264 encode.

    Somewhere in there (probably prior to editing), you probably want to have a NTSC->PAL AVISynth process to get all your stuff into PAL format (since that's your country's standard).

    Everything you're doing is SD, so the files will be BIG but not H*U*G*E.

    IMO, you'll probably have to forget the stuff recorded on the Samsung DVR unless you go out to analog & then back in. Even then, there might be roadblocks.

    Scott
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  3. Member Ennio's Avatar
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    Thanks Cornucopia,

    Can you explain why you would use a switch between the VCR and TBC?

    Btw we plan to not convert NTSC files to PAL. I guess we'll have 2 types of BD to author which is no problem. It's my experience that european consumers BD/DVD-players and TV's/Beamers can handle NTSC very well. Ours do anyway.

    Ennio

    Edit;
    Originally Posted by Cornucopia View Post
    Here's an overview of how I would set this up:

    (devices)->...
    Ah, never mind my question about the switch. I read too fast over "devices". Plural. As we will connect 1 VCR at a time we don't need a switch, my guess. Cheers.
    Last edited by Ennio; 28th Aug 2012 at 08:39. Reason: got it
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