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  1. Member
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    Hi all

    I have just reformmated my Notebook form XP to win7 and have installed Avisynth, Vdub and Windv

    I decided to capture my VHS collection VCR>>svideo>>CAMCORDER>>iee1394>>PC

    I dont think I'm caputuring Lossless DV to my notebook, as i'm only getting 13GB a hour

    Is there a option im using windv to capture

    Notebook in a Dell Precision M90Core 2 Duo Nvidia Quadro


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    Last edited by zack28; 15th Feb 2014 at 14:11.
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  2. Member
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    DV is not lossless. 13GB an hour sounds right, you're capturing the actual stream from the device,
    unprocessed.
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    Thanks for the quick advice

    I've heard that some people can capture 30GB a hour using VHS raw transfer, is that some other method of capturing tapes
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    If you want to capture lossless you will need a capture card and use a lossless codec, rather than the firewire camcorder.

    It might be worth capturing lossless if you had a professional VCR with TBC and wanted the most quality. But for most VHS captures, DV capture would be fine.
    Last edited by Vidd; 15th Feb 2014 at 14:33.
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    Yes. You capture using composite or s-video to the device, typically USB or PCI express card.
    Within the software, you can set the codec to be used. Often, something like Huffyuv or Lagarith
    (compressed lossless) would be used.
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    VHS->DV discards 50% of the original chroma data and digitizes VHS defects as digital artifacts that are more difficult to filter. You'll get higher quality capturing to lossless media. But if you have no way of doing it, you'll have to go with DV.

    DV is PC-only playback. If you want other output (DVD, h264, etc.), you'll have to re-encode. Two lossy encodes are not better than one, which is why lossless capture is usually recommended for VHS. But sometimes DV is the only method available.
    Last edited by sanlyn; 19th Mar 2014 at 06:18.
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    thanks again for the info

    The VCR i have is PAN NVHS960B is does have a tbc button, but i dont use it, as i cant see any difference with it on.
    Can i use huffy or lag codec with this VCR (or is it not a Pro VCR) or do i have to buy a USB capture card instead of using camcorder

    Is the capture quality of the usb capture card a LOT better or just a tiny bit better, and is it worth it to the equipment i'm using at the moment
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    The TBC is supposed to stabilize the side to side jitter so common with VHS. Probably more
    noticeable on some tapes than others. If you get a capture card, you can usually use generic capture
    software such AmarecTV or iuVcr. Within the software you can select the capture codec.

    Why don't you post a 10 second sample of your DV capture? I understand PAL DV is a better choice than the
    NTSC equivalent because of the color sampling. Perhaps it's good enough?
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  9. Originally Posted by sanlyn View Post
    VHS->DV discards 50% of the original chroma data
    Are you sure about that? He's in the UK using a PAL VCR with PAL tapes so it's YUV 4:2.0, the same as YV12, right? NTSC DV-AVI is 4:1:1.

    And zack28, turn on the TBC and turn off the DNR, if you use it.
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    Oh, yeah. PAL VHS. We've had a few threads featuring PAL VHS->DV during the past year. Made me grateful they're not my tapes.
    Last edited by sanlyn; 19th Mar 2014 at 06:18.
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    Originally Posted by davexnet View Post
    Why don't you post a 10 second sample of your DV capture? I understand PAL DV is a better choice than the
    NTSC equivalent because of the color sampling. Perhaps it's good enough?

    Hi

    Ive posted 2 (10sec clips (tbc on)) the video was captured in 1988 The VCR that was used to capture this vid was bought in 1981 (Hitach VT-7000E VCR ( it came in 3 parts, the main VCR (top loading) Timer (which housed the battery for using when out and about) The Camera (which connected to the VCR) weighted a ton when using outdoors and footage could only be viewed when connected to a TV

    I had to use a external light to shoot this vid as the camera was very poor indoors
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    Last edited by zack28; 18th Feb 2014 at 13:18.
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    Were these videos actually recorded in the 80's? What kind of camera?
    It's hard to say whether an alternative capture method might improve the situation or not.
    They look a little flat, low contrast. Also, pretty grainy, a thing I've seen with DV captures previously.
    The first, with the baby, is very grainy Does it look any better in well lit scenes?

    Sorry I can't offer anything more definitive. Is your aim to make a DVD?
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    Hi

    They were recorded in 1988, the camera used was a HITACHI VK-C770 which would attach to the Hitachi VT-7000E purchased in 1981 (came in 3 parts VCR,Timer,Camera) I know the camera is quite primitive (released in 1979, cost £1000) to what came out later in the 80s and 90s I still have it in the loft, cant get rid of it too many happy memories it was used from 1981 till 1989 (about 20 vhs tapes i have recorded) It was mostly used indoors, I did on occassion use it outdoors on holiday, but it weighted a lot as all 3 parts had to be carried and you could not see what was being recorded as you needed to connect it to a Home TV, that why most of the recordings are done at home as you had to watch the TV screen to what you were recording, I used a external light source as the camera was really poor at capturing indoor shots

    would lossless capture give me any better results

    I can replace camcorder pass thru bit with a capture card
    but
    i use a notebook it will have to be a external capture card


    Goals are

    Capture all VHS tapes (raw dv) to a 750GB (WD) usb drive (for safekeeping)
    Use AVS and VD to sort out the videos

    I'm stuck to what format i should use. container codec wise


    If i was to create a DVD9 disc(not VideoTS,AudioTS) but 1981.avi (divx mp2 352x576) would that play on DVD Player and Bluray player (both divx compatible) or will i have issues

    thanks again for your responses so far
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    Lossless would not be so much "better", but would be easier to clean up. DV is lossy compression. It can look OK, but it tends to emphasize tape artifacts and is more difficult to filter. If capturing to DV you have to encode anyway to another codec, and two lossy encodes are not better than one lossy encode. Two encodes involves a generation loss, the degree of loss depending on how it's done. Dirty noisy damaged old ugly VHS is not made "better" by capturing to lossy DV and encoding again. DV is PC-only playback.

    Lossless capture: 720x480 with YUY2 color using huffyuv or Lagarith lossless compression. The captured files would be about 30 GB per hour. Your laptop drive would not be adequate for 20 tapes; store each capture on an external drive, pull segments off the drive as you need them. How many hours will you capture? 20 hours would be about 600 GB. Many external capture cards will not work with Vista/W7/W8. Other members can advise specific USB capture devices. I don't use them.

    You cannot burn with DVD menus and features to DivX. You would have to encode to DivX and burn as "data" to DVD-R or DVD-R/DL disc, not to "DVD" format. What's wrong with MPEG? If you are considering that you can make smaller DivX files at lower bitrates with "bad" source tape, you will get low quality with either DivX or MPEG using low-bitrate encoding. There is a lot of camera motion in your two samples: more motion requires higher bitrates.

    Your two sample captures have serious ghost trails (nothing you can do about that, it was caused by the camera), bad dot crawl and chroma sampling errors, serious chroma noise, and a persistent "ghost" image overlaid on every frame.
    Last edited by sanlyn; 19th Mar 2014 at 06:18.
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  15. I agree with sanlyn. If you want to make something for a DivX-compatible DVD or Blu-Ray player, it wouldn't be a DivX or XviD AVI, but a real DVD. If you did make it DivX, you won't want it at 352x480 as that's how it'll play - 352x480. You'll want to make it 640x480. But I still wouldn't do it. I'd make a 720x480 DVD.
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    Some players will not respect a DivX aspect ratio that differs from its frame size. Depends on the player. If your heart is set on DivX, which offers no particular advantage that I can think of for DVD players (not all DVD players will play DivX; many will, many will not), then your 4:3 original source would be captured at 640x480. Consider this: VHS has low resolution to begin with. Bad old ugly noisy damaged VHS will lose some detail through denoising. Half-frame sizes such as 352x480 from VHS will not look very good when upsampled on a TV, and will look terrible on a new HDTV. For play-anywhere compatibility, I would suggest MPEG/DVD at decent bitrates.
    Last edited by sanlyn; 19th Mar 2014 at 06:19.
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  17. Member
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    Many, Many thanks

    for your advice

    What i shall do is capture via camcorder to Notebook for now (DV) Capture 1 VHS tape to notebook, then transfer the DV footage to my WD 750GB USB Drive, delete off notebook and Capture another VHS tape , transfer.....and so on for all 20 tapes.

    Once ive captured all the DV footage to my 750GB drive I can then copy the first DV back to notebook and work on it one at a time

    I shall think about capturing the tapes again in the future using a lossless method, are there any external capture card for notebooks dont have a desktop

    I shall try DVD Video (H.262) using Verbitam DVD+R DL (8.5GB) , can i use 352x576 or would 640x480 be a better option for this type of codec and how many hrs can you fit onto DVD9

    Thanks again
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  18. Originally Posted by zack28 View Post
    are there any external capture card for notebooks
    There are plenty of USB capture devices.
    I shall try DVD Video (H.262) using Verbitam DVD+R DL (8.5GB) , can i use 352x576 or would 640x480 be a better option for this type of codec and how many hrs can you fit onto DVD9
    DVD video isn't H.262 (whatever that is) but MPEG-2 video. 640x480 isn't an allowable resolution for DVD video. And, as I already said, I'd go with 720x480. Others might disagree and say they'd go with 352x480. You can fit a virtually unlimited number of hours onto a DVD9. The more you force in, the worse it'll look. The filesize is determined by the bitrate used. Maybe 3 hours is a good safe amount for a DVD9. Much more than that and maybe 352x480 is the better choice. None of this is set in stone and depends a lot on the material, how well it's been filtered after capping (if at all), and your own personal standards of quality.

    But maybe you didn't mean DVD video and want to make an MKV or MP4 using the H.264 or x264 video codecs. Then you can make it 640x480.
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    The OP is i the UK, so he should probably cap at 720x576.
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  20. Right, thanks for the correction. I even mentioned him being in PAL land earlier. It's all sanlyn's fault for mentioning 480 in the first place.
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    Ah, but if he wanted DV-only.......

    Never mind.
    Last edited by sanlyn; 19th Mar 2014 at 06:19.
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  22. Originally Posted by davexnet View Post
    The OP is i the UK, so he should probably cap at 720x576.
    This is something I really don't understand.

    I understand that the true resolution of PAL VHS is 352 x 288. (This varies depending on what I read though).

    I've always thought that if you know you're going to be downscaling at some later stage, you really want your capture resolution to be a perfect multiple of the original resolution, or indeed the true resolution of the original image. This way, when downscaling, you're just skipping every other pixel (or every third, depending on the multiplier), and you're never losing data, because you oversampled in the first place.

    So I always thought that the ideal capture resolution would be 704 x 576. Exactly double VHS resolution in either direction. The 576 resolution ensure that the interlacing information is captured correctly (double 288), and the 704 horizontal resolution is exactly double 352, so can be easily halved without any messiness.

    Going from 720 to 352 surely involves some artifacting, as it's not a perfect multiple of the source resolution?
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  23. Originally Posted by manono View Post
    DVD video isn't H.262 (whatever that is) but MPEG-2 video
    H.262 is exactly what people named MPEG-2 (formally ISO 13818-2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.262/MPEG-2_Part_2

    Capturing (digitalization/sampling) should be performed at highest possible (technically/cost justified) way - in PAL case this can be 720x576 4:2:2 (YUY2 etc) scheme, audio 48000 16/24 bits, all related sub-formats can be created later at digital domain.
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    Originally Posted by Jaydee View Post
    Originally Posted by davexnet View Post
    The OP is i the UK, so he should probably cap at 720x576.
    This is something I really don't understand.

    I understand that the true resolution of PAL VHS is 352 x 288. (This varies depending on what I read though).

    I've always thought that if you know you're going to be downscaling at some later stage, you really want your capture resolution to be a perfect multiple of the original resolution, or indeed the true resolution of the original image. This way, when downscaling, you're just skipping every other pixel (or every third, depending on the multiplier), and you're never losing data, because you oversampled in the first place.

    So I always thought that the ideal capture resolution would be 704 x 576. Exactly double VHS resolution in either direction. The 576 resolution ensure that the interlacing information is captured correctly (double 288), and the 704 horizontal resolution is exactly double 352, so can be easily halved without any messiness.

    Going from 720 to 352 surely involves some artifacting, as it's not a perfect multiple of the source resolution?
    The true resolution of PAL VHS is approx 350 (being generous) x 576.

    576 is absolute, while the 350 will usually be lower, depending of the quality of the tape, original signal,
    VCR, etc,etc. Notjhing wrong with capturing at 704x576 or 720x576
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  25. That is so damn helpful. Thank you. I finally understand!

    Weird to think that the horizontal resolution can vary in that strange way though. Huh.
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  26. Originally Posted by pandy View Post
    H.262 is exactly what people named MPEG-2 (formally ISO 13818-2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.262/MPEG-2_Part_2
    Thanks. Never heard of it but there it is in black and white.
    Capturing (digitalization/sampling) should be performed at highest possible (technically/cost justified) way - in PAL case this can be 720x576 4:2:2 (YUY2 etc) scheme
    At the moment he's capping in DV-AVI so that's 4:2:0. I usually cap at 720x576 and 4:2:0 myself, losslessly, since DVD is my final destination and it's 4:2:0 as well. The idea is to avoid colorspace conversions. I know some disagree with that. Almost all my stuff is black and white which may play a role.
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  27. Originally Posted by manono View Post
    At the moment he's capping in DV-AVI so that's 4:2:0. I usually cap at 720x576 and 4:2:0 myself, losslessly, since DVD is my final destination and it's 4:2:0 as well. The idea is to avoid colorspace conversions. I know some disagree with that. Almost all my stuff is black and white which may play a role.
    There no space conversion between 4:2:0 and 4:2:2 - sampling scheme can be changed but color space remain same, 4:2:2 is independent from interlace/progressive chroma sampling problem where 4:2:0 suffer from vertical subsampling issue - i would say that 4:2:0 is OK in one case - where there is no processing involved and samples are recorded directly on DVD but if there is any processing involved especially deinterlacing then 4:2:2 is more than recommended.

    And one comment why to capture bandlimited signal with higher sampling - usually line is captured with 27/2 MHz clock - this is due BT.656 standard which seem to be widely accepted in NTSC/PAL world. Resampling later is performed by hardware resizer in capture chip - usually this algorithms are not so fancy as those implemented in software.
    Also very important is way how ADC and overall DSP works - it is better simply to oversample data - this reduce quantization error and can provide better accuracy of conversion.
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  28. Originally Posted by pandy View Post
    i would say that 4:2:0 is OK in one case - where there is no processing involved and samples are recorded directly on DVD but if there is any processing involved especially deinterlacing then 4:2:2 is more than recommended.
    I do lots of processing before the final encode to DVD-Video (keeping it 4:2:0 at all stages), so thanks for the advice.

    I have no idea what the second paragraph means (no need to explain).
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  29. Originally Posted by manono View Post
    Originally Posted by pandy View Post
    i would say that 4:2:0 is OK in one case - where there is no processing involved and samples are recorded directly on DVD but if there is any processing involved especially deinterlacing then 4:2:2 is more than recommended.
    I do lots of processing before the final encode to DVD-Video (keeping it 4:2:0 at all stages), so thanks for the advice.

    I have no idea what the second paragraph means (no need to explain).
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroma_subsampling

    See by your own eyes.
    4:2:0 should be final stage but processing should be performed at least in 4:2:2.
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    What do you mean by "processing"? Most Avisynth and VirtualDub filters won't work with YUY2.
    Last edited by sanlyn; 19th Mar 2014 at 06:19.
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