Haunted by white vertical wave-like electronic patterns

[ESPY]

About I month ago, I started doing VHS to DVD transfers (usually just 90 minute movies) using an ATI AIW 9000 and a DataVideo TBC-1000. After experimenting with what seemed like a million different settings, I feel like I'm finally getting out of the newbie forest. The time has come to start seriously archiving my rumpy old VHS collection.

I like to do captures when I leave for work in the morning. Turn everything on, leave it running all day. When I come home, I’ve got a nice Mpeg-2 waiting for me, and I burn a disc. I should be satisfied. But that’s still not good enough. I get greedy and try and capture another 90 min. movie and burn it before slipping off to bed.

The thing I’ve noticed about these “later that same day” transfers is they tend to be marked by a ghostly white vertical wave-like electronic pattern throughout them, especially noticeable during dark scenes. Doesn’t matter what size capture I do, or what the bit rate is. It’s usually there.

My guess is that something in my system is probably not happy from being switched on all day. By early evening my AIW, my TBC, my PC, and my JVC S-VHS player are all feeling a little warm (I seem to remember someone posting something about problems with the TBC-1000 when it gets warm).
I’m curious about a couple of things:

1. Has anyone else ever been haunted by “ghostly white vertical wave-like electronic patterns? What causes them? How can I prevent them? Is there some fancy new video engineering word that I have to learn, like “demux?”

2. Am I just asking for trouble by leaving my taxing my
equipment for 12 hours, plus? Should I just be satisfied with one nice transfer a day?

Any thoughts would be appreciated…

Thanks!

[rcb]

you might try reversing your routine so as to do your one capture session per day in the evening and see if the ghosting stays or goes.

if it stays, might be something a simple as a fluorescent lamp close by or such.

if it disappears ( and particularly if comes back with a morning session), then it may well be one of your capping components getting a little "heat exhaustion".

[FulciLives]

rcb has a point there. For a while I had these strange lines of distortion that came up on one of my televisions and I couldn't figure out why sometimes it did it and sometimes it didn't.

Turned out it was a hologen lamp that I had. You have to "play with it" by turning it up and or down until you find a range where the distortion on the TV goes away. That or turn it off completely.

So it might be the computer or video equipment heating up or it might be something "simple" like my hologen lamp problem.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman