Capturing VHS

[LMotlow]

For the past few years, AVT has been bought out by an outfit that thinks QC is a bad thing. For AVT's that still work (mine does), you'll see some gamma problems (so use their proc amp to correct it), but I've had better luck with DVD recorders used as pass-thru. Some of them can also ignore Macrovision, although even a "corrected" Macrovision tape exhibits some problems. Most of the time you can clean up those problems in post processing. But it ain't easy.

For non-Macrovision tapes, a frame tbc like the AVT or TBC-1000 can improve audio sync, prevent dropped frames, and get your capture right on speed if it's a really godawful tape and your player isn't in top shape. But most of the time they're not so useful for non-Macrovision tapes and all of them affect gamma, color, sharpness, etc., in some way.

I have 3 VCR's and two more spares. Yep, each seems to play a different tape.

[buyabook]

what do you mean when you say that AVT has been bought out by a n outfit that thinks QC is a bad thing?

[LMotlow]

It means QC (quality control) is shot to hell on the newer AVT's. There are also a ton of low quality spinoffs of the original AVT-8710.

[buyabook]

I have 70 home video VHS tapes. I was satisfied with the 8mm tapes that saved to DV AVI. Each file for each 2 hour tape came to 26 gigs and I find that reasonable. If i follow either workflow, what file format should I be saving to:

JVC VCR -->TBC--> ati 600 usb capture card
JVC VCR --> TBC -->Handycam DV Passthrough--> Firewire capture card

[LMotlow]

I have 70 home video VHS tapes. I was satisfied with the 8mm tapes that saved to DV AVI. Each file for each 2 hour tape came to 26 gigs and I find that reasonable. If i follow either workflow, what file format should I be saving to:

JVC VCR -->TBC--> ati 600 usb capture card

With devices like the AT600, capture analog tape to lossless YUY2 AVI using VirtualDub capture and Lagarith or huffyuv lossless compression.

JVC VCR --> TBC -->Handycam DV Passthrough--> Firewire capture card

DV source tapes are properly transferred (not captured) via Firewire, as you say you're doing. No problem there. If the tapes are analog, you can capture to DV-AVI if you want, but DV and analog tapes aren't very friendly with each other. Other members can help you clean up analog-to-DV artifacts, I'm gettting too old for that much work. In any case, DV will have to be re-encoded to other formats if you want anything other than PC-only playback. DV is easy to edit (cut and join), but if you want color fix, denosiing, etc., DV will be re-encoded with quality loss.

[buyabook]

how many gigs per hour for lossless YUY2 AVI? I figure if i have an ATI capture card i'll probably use this workflow compared to using my handycam.

JVC VCR -->TBC--> ati 600 usb capture card

With devices like the AT600, capture analog tape to lossless YUY2 AVI using VirtualDub capture and Lagarith or huffyuv lossless compression.

[LMotlow]

Somewhat larger than DV, about 30GB/hour with lossless compression. You can set lossless compression with UT codec, but to get smaller files with UT you need to set up higher compression that's too slow for capture.

[Brad]

Modern CPUs can capture 1080p60 and beyond with Ut Video's highest compression settings and still not break a sweat (but HDD write speeds are a bottleneck). The 6.5-year-old CPU in this capture machine can do it.

[buyabook]

Assuming there are 4 hours of video on each tape and 70 tapes in total , I would need 8400 gigs to capture all this VHS. I would like to cut that down to 3500-4000 gigs. The handycam captures at 13 gigs/hour to DV avi. Can I achieve a similar bitrate if I use the ATI 600 usb capture card or will I lose on quality? Considering that I am capturing standard defintion VHS, I'd imagine that I can get away with a compressed file format compared to lossless without losing on quality.

[buyabook]

i want my file format to end up being h.264. Can I capture to MPEG-2 broadcast bitrate and then encode to h.264?

http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/video-capture/3548-best-capture-format.html

There are four possible workflows:

Format|Media|Size per hour|Benefits|Drawbacks
Huffyuv AVI|Hard drive|35-40GB/hour|Lossless, no compression artifacts|size
MPEG-2 for DVD|DVD-Video|max 4GB/hour|Standard DVD|Quality is not "the best"
MPEG-2 broadcast bitrate|Hard drive or Blu-ray|avg 10GB/hour (15mpbs)|Better than DVD, smaller than Huffyuv|not DVD
H.264|Blu-ray, HTPC|~1GB/hour|Better than DVD|must encode to H.264


Note that my size for H.264 may be off (up to 2GB/hour max), as I've not measured it to date.
The downside to H.264 is that you cannot (and/or SHOULD not) capture to it directly. It's not a capturing format.
HTPC = plays in a "media center" like the Western Digital WDTV, and is stored on hard drives.

With an ATI All In Wonder card, you can capture to lower-end MPEG-2 broadcast, up to 20MB/s
Or capture directly to MPEG-2 for DVD, with slight quality loss against lossless > 2-pass MPEG conversions.
And it can capture lossless AVI via VirtualDub or ATI MMC, but VirtualDub is suggested.

So ... which one interests you most? I use all four, depending on what I feel is best for the scenario. There's no one right answer.

• Personally, I suggest MPEG-2 broadcast specs, if long-term archiving family home movies.
• If it's just TV recordings, and they're not impossibly rare, then I'd suggest going straight to DVD-Video MPEG specs.
• If you have some sort of amazingly rare video, capture as Huffyuv, then encode it to a second "watchable" copy (DVD, fore example).

[LMotlow]

Assuming there are 4 hours of video on each tape and 70 tapes in total , I would need 8400 gigs to capture all this VHS. I would like to cut that down to 3500-4000 gigs. The handycam captures at 13 gigs/hour to DV avi. Can I achieve a similar bitrate if I use the ATI 600 usb capture card or will I lose on quality?

Yes, of you cap to MPEG2. That would be a little cleaner than DV, considering the source.

Considering that I am capturing standard defintion VHS, I'd imagine that I can get away with a compressed file format compared to lossless without losing on quality.

You imagine incorrectly, but frankly many viewers are so half-blind they can't tell the difference anyway. Good luck if you want to "improve" anything, though, with lossy codecs. Or go with a decent bitrate with h264. In any event, you'll have to live with some compression noise from analog tape. If you plan on "edits" (cut/join on specific frames), stay with DV and then re-encode to a final format. With the other formats, you'll need to make edits with smart-rendering editors. Anything beyond cut and join will require re-encoding.

[manono]

Considering that I am capturing standard defintion VHS, I'd imagine that I can get away with a compressed file format compared to lossless without losing on quality.

On the face of it that statement makes no sense. The fact that your sources are standard definition has nothing to do with anything. Also, codecs such as UT and Lagarith are both compressed and lossless and you won't lose any quality. But you mean (I think) that you can use a lossy codec such as DV AVI on your VHS tapes and not lose any quality, and that's not correct. However, I usually use DV AVI myself (and agree with vaporeon800 that the AVT-8710 is pretty much useless) but do so much work on my tape sources before finally finished that any minor degradation of the DV 'source' doesn't matter in the long run since all my intermediates are lossless Lagarith AVI.

i want my file format to end up being h.264. Can I capture to MPEG-2 broadcast bitrate and then encode to h.264?

You could. I wouldn't. One of my final formats is also h.264 but the quality of MPEG-2 caps as provided by the included software for most capture devices isn't very good. Now, maybe if you could cap MPEG-2 at a bitrate of 15,000 or so, but I think your aim in using it in the first place is smaller sizes.

[Brad]

Assuming there are 4 hours of video on each tape and 70 tapes in total , I would need 8400 gigs to capture all this VHS. I would like to cut that down to 3500-4000 gigs.

No one's saying you have to store the lossless captures forever. The idea is to start with the cleanest capture you can get before you convert it to your desired output formats.

Can I achieve a similar bitrate if I use the ATI 600 usb capture card or will I lose on quality?

You can capture using any compressor you want including DV with the ATI 600. But the results would probably be worse than the camcorder method, as it likely includes some line TBC while the ATI 600 does not.

This thread may help you decide whether the losses incurred with DV are something you care about.

[buyabook]

@vaporeon800, I want to store them in archive format that's larger than H.264. If I ever do, I will most probably edit the lossless captures after 2-3 years.

[Brad]

[EDIT: This post was in response to a question about DV capture using the ATI 600 and a comment about AVT-8710 user impressions on DigitalFAQ seeming to be positive as compared to the negative response received here on VideoHelp. These were erased from post #44 by an edit.]

Yes, but see my post above for why you probably wouldn't want to (we posted about the same time).

I can point you to plenty of users on DigitalFAQ complaining that their AVT-8710s don't work as expected. One guy went as far as buying and returning 5 units (or some other ridiculous number) from B&H Photo Video and compiled a file on the internal differences between each of them. I forget whether he ended up with one that he was pleased with or not.

[buyabook]

The vcr I will use (jvc HR-S9500U)has a line TBC.

I want to capture all 70 tapes right now and then edit when I have time. I can't do that if I use lossless because it will be 8400 gigs if I take that route. When I get a chance, I'll take a look at that link you posted above regarding DV-AVI.

MPEG-2 at a bitrate of 15,000 is looking like an attractive option but I need to determine the gigs/hour.

[buyabook]

Noob question: Is there an automated process to restore vhs captures? Like if I click a single button in an application, it runs a script on the capture file to enhance the quality with dependable results? I'd like to automate my workflow as much as possible.

[Brad]

^ I think about the only reliable automated enhancement you could expect is noise reduction, if that, but your VCR will be forcing that into the capture process anyway so you may not want to further process the remaining noise trails.

The vcr I will use (jvc HR-S9500U)has a line TBC.

Oh, that's a great point. That info ended up on the previous page, so I forgot. In that case even a DV capture with the ATI 600 is likely to be better than a camcorder passthrough, particularly because you have some opportunity to adjust levels with its Proc Amp controls.

I see you edited your post #44 after I posted #45, so that the content I was replying to is no longer present. In future please only add to posts when you edit; don't replace the entire post. Now the conversation we were having is difficult for anyone else to follow.

I want to capture all 70 tapes right now and then edit when I have time. I can't do that if I use lossless because it will be 8400 gigs if I take that route.

Okay. I'm not sure how realistic it is that you'll truly make it a priority to sit down and edit them in the future any more than you want to now, but if this is your goal then it's your goal.

MPEG-2 at a bitrate of 15,000 is looking like an attractive option but I need to determine the gigs/hour.

I think you'd be better off with a bitrate of 25Mbps, which matches DV (and you already know how much space this will take). I still don't know whether this will actually be better quality than DV; this is highly dependent on the quality of the MPEG-2 implementation as encoders very widely and the features they can use in realtime are limited.

Editing MPEG-2 can be noticeably slower than DV or lossless, unless you use I-Frame Only. Using I-Frame Only has the disadvantage of potentially worse quality at any given bitrate.

You could also try a capture straight to interlaced H.264 I-Frame Only using x264vfw with a CRF value that produces video around 25Mbps. I believe that should be higher quality than DV or most MPEG-2 encoders, and also has the advantage that it's already in your desired output format if you give up on the idea of editing and just want to play the stored files. But it will be slower to edit than MPEG-2 if your editing app in the future year of 20xx relies on CPU for decompression.

[jagabo]

about the only reliable automated enhancement you could expect is noise reduction, if that, but your VCR will be forcing that into the capture process anyway

Yes, that is unfortunate since the VCR's noise reduction is so poor.

[Brad]

You mean this particular model or JVC's DigiPure in general?

Technically one can keep JVC's TBC active and turn off the DNR by enabling EDIT mode, but that adds edge enhancement according to all samples I've seen posted.

[jagabo]

You mean this particular model or JVC's DigiPure in general?

VHS deck denoisers in general.

[Brad]

I feel so alone when I note that on other forums.

The thing that really makes me sad is that my HS-HD2000U denoises even when "DNR&TBC" is off. I'm so fond of its clarity and lack of sharpening otherwise. Still searching for a D-VHS or S-VHS model that will just give me a nice "unprocessed" image.

[buyabook]

If I don't use the AVT 8710 or the TBC-1000, is there another popular functional TBC that I can purchase which is available today for ~200-250? If not, i am thinking of dropping the idea of using a Full Frame TBC. Digital FAQ highlights the importance of a full frame TBC but if it really doesn't make a difference, I should stop chasing one and start capturing as soon as my ATI 600 card arrives.

Also is there a guide for using proc amp controls on JVC vcrs, I don't have experience with those controls.

[LMotlow]

I'm getting the idea you don't know the difference between line-level and frame-level tbc's. Yes, you can use a few legacy DVD recorders as tbc pass-thru. It depends on which problems you're trying to address. For analog tape, a line-level tbc is essential. You appear to have such a tbc in your player. A frame level tbc isn't absolutely essential, unless you're hassling with Macrovision or with tape that's so godawful it can't output a properly timed fps signal or maintain audio sync. The pass-thru devices have elementary frame-sync and line level tbc's built in and they work tolerably well. Those that I've used in the past ignored Macrovision in the signal when used as pass-thru (but they will not record copy-protected sources). You can find units for pass-thru on auction sites and other used sources. If their optical drives don't record, no problem, they can still be used for pass-thru if everything else works.
https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/319420-Who-uses-a-DVD-recorder-as-a-line-TBC-and-what-do-you-use

[buyabook]

this is for home videos recorded on hi8 which were then recorded to VHS, no copyright protection exists on these tapes.

[Brad]

Also is there a guide for using proc amp controls on JVC vcrs, I don't have experience with those controls.

The Proc Amp control I referred to is a feature of the ATI 600 and other PC capture devices, not the VCR. If you use VirtualDub just go to Video -> Levels for the easiest access to them. It's a series of sliders. The first thing you need to do with an ATI 600 is scroll Sharpness all the way to the left so it's at 0, because it's at 2 by default. The only other useful control during capture is Brightness, which can be set with the help of a Histogram. Normally you could also set Contrast, but on the ATI 600 it doesn't do anything that you can't do equally as well post-capture because it's unable to recover clipped brights the way that other capture devices can.

[buyabook]

i purchased an ATI TV WonderHD 600 USB Digital w/ Analog TV Tuner HD60. Let's see how it goes.

[buyabook]

is there an online guide providing details in regards to capturing vhs while using the ati 600 usb stick? I installed the drivers for it and I connected the vcr to the stick. I opened up virtual dub but I don't know how to start capturing my VHS.

[jagabo]

http://www.doom9.org/capture/capturing_vdub.html

[buyabook]

Please note that I was unable to install catalyst media center because the screen stalled at the setup screen for over 10 minutes. I was able to install the drivers off of the CD that came with the usb stick. My VCR is on. In virtualdub, I clicked file-->capture avi and I select device --> ATI TV Wonder 600 USB 2.0 (direct show). I see TV static in the window pane. When the VCR is powered on and the mode is set to stop, I normally see a blue screen on my TV. I clicked play on the VCR and it continues to show TV static. I connected the same vcr to a tv and when I press play, I see the video i am supposed to see. Is my usb stick defective? Also, the LED light on the usb stick is off. Is that normal?