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  1. Terminal n00b
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    I'm rescuing old cassettes to DVD's with a Sony RDR-VX560. Making dubs works well. However, there is some slight tearing at the bottom of the image. I'm using a small 19" HD Sharp TV as a monitor; it's tied to the VX-560 with HDMI. The tearing isn't as noticeable there but I can find it. It's much more obvious in the DVD's. The obvious question is "can I make it go away"?

    The tearing doesn't make the image unusable. It's just an annoyance. I tried tweaking tracking but that didn't make any difference to the tearing (it did booger picture, of course). The VX-560 came from eBay; I have no information on its history.

    A friend suggested the heads may want a bath. With reasonable care, can I wash them with alcohol? I don't have a cleaning cassette; my recollection from when I made my tapes is most cassettes made matters worse, anyway. FWIW, I spool the tapes forward and back before playing them.
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  2. Member hech54's Avatar
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    The lines at the bottom are overscan. 90% of my captures or records from VHS have them. I leave them there simply because the act or removing them WILL result in re-encoding and quality loss.
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  3. Terminal n00b
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    OK, I understand overscan. My main concern is making sure I'm getting as much image as possible.
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  4. Member DB83's Avatar
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    What hech54 is saying is that when you play back on a tv, its overscan will cover the 'tearing'

    The 'tearing' is a product of the VHS head-drum. It is always there. You can 'remove' it by adding a black border to cover it. No one recommends that you crop it away and resize your image.
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  5. Terminal n00b
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    My question was essentially "is that jiggy stuff at the bottom of the screen lost image or 'the wages of TV'". Heck, if it came down to it, I could put a strip of black tape across the screen to cover the overscan. And, of course, in the bad old days of CRT tv's, that basically what happened. The image was made large enough to cover over the curious bits at the top and bottom.
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  6. Member
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    Originally Posted by RBEmerson View Post
    My question was essentially "is that jiggy stuff at the bottom of the screen lost image or 'the wages of TV'". Heck, if it came down to it, I could put a strip of black tape across the screen to cover the overscan. And, of course, in the bad old days of CRT tv's, that basically what happened. The image was made large enough to cover over the curious bits at the top and bottom.
    Can you provide a screen shot showing the problem ?
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  7. Terminal n00b
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    I'll give it a shot (er, no pun intended).
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  8. Terminal n00b
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    This is a good representation of the problem:

    Click image for larger version

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    The tape (from 200n?) was made with a capture from a wire (vs. FiOS) cable connection, all very much pre-HD. The conversion was done on the VX-560 onto a DVD-R. The image was captured from viewing the video with VLC. The scene is a zoom out of the logo shown. That's all probably a little OCD but there it is.
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  9. Formerly 'vaporeon800' Brad's Avatar
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    Yes it is technically lost picture information, but there is nothing you can do to restore it without adding additional hardware or possibly messing with the internals of your unit. Cleaning the heads is unrelated. Your machine distorts more lines than the average VCR, there are some that distort only a couple, and a few that were specifically designed to recover as much image as possible. (Some further reading from my quests through this topic.)

    I would be more concerned by the ridiculous amount of artifacting in the rest of the picture, but if it doesn't bother you, consider yourself lucky.
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  10. Terminal n00b
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    OK, gotit on the tearing. Life goes on.

    But artifacting? It may help to point out this tape is about 15 years old, was captured off a Comcast wire connection (vs. fiber) before HD was an option. This is the bad old 512 scan line stuff. Aside from the miserable resolution (IMHO the VX-560 does a passable, if not great, job of trying to heal the miserable image) and the 4:3 aspect ratio, the results are surprisingly good. I think much of what you're reacting to is a classic case of GIGO. The signal Comcast shoved down the wire wasn't that good to begin with, and it all went downhill from there, so there's no surprise the DVD winds up with a less than stellar set of images.
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