Postponing restoration.

[swiego]

I have a JVC 9911U and a Sony EV-S7000 as 8mm and VHS playback devices and have probably close to 100 tapes to digitize. Some are good quality but some need some work. (Faded, blown out highlights, ghosting, noise, the usual suspects.)

I'm nearing the point where I've thrown enough money at the equipment and want to draw a line and get started. I noticed that there are quite a few image processors of various kinds (i.e. Signvideo DR1000) that I could use at time of capture. By all accounts, these are fantastic, better than their software counterparts, and I won't dispute that.

That being the case, my goal right now is to capture this stuff off magnetic media before the media degrades further. I have absolutely no problem saving the "restoration" process for a few years. I'm sure that by 2007 I'll have far more compute power and much slicker video restoration software at my disposal.

My question: for those of you who want to capture for archival with an eye toward restoration (not now but eventually) what hardware should I be getting now vs. what investments can I postpone?

Examples:

TBC: software cannot clean this up, even 2007 software, so purchase & use TBC during the capture process.

Image Enhancement: software might be able to clean this up down the road, perhaps as well as today's hardware video enhancers, so consider postponing this investment.

Any thoughts on the above statements? True? Not true? I'm not doubting that the hardware does its job or is desirable; rather, in the interest of $ and getting started, when reading this forum I'd like to be able to differentiate between restoration that *must* be done during capture vs. restoration that *can* be done effectively post-capture, or someday will be done effectively post-capture in software.

Does this make any sense?

[dphirschler]

I'd say an affordable way to do what you want is this:

1. Get a good playback VCR
2. Get a good TBC
3. Archive to DV or even save your raw captures to DVD


Darryl

[Hellbore]

Yeah but how can you archive to DV?? That's the problem I have thought about. DV takes up so much space there is no practical way. Storing it on a hard drive isn't that safe, hard drives eventually wear out. DV tape is a conundrum too because it's magnetic media. I guess you could transfer to DV tape and buy yourself more time, since it's new and won't wear out for a while, but any magnetic media has a finite lifespan.

Someone needs to come up with an optical medium that holds enough data to store DV copies of movies and such. That would be killer!

[DaveS]

one way and I'm not necessarily recommending this, but for example the JVC HR-DVS3U has both a miniDV deck and a VHS deck..this lets you dub the VHS direct to miniDV - press one button and it starts, but would be doing a lot in one fell swoop, incl. cleanup/noise reduction (which JVC does well), TBC or jitter reduction, and also analog to digital conversion..but for 100 tapes, it's a relatively inexpensive way to do it...if you just capture your materials straight to AVI, you will end up with a lot of disks..if you convert to mpeg, you are doing everything anyway...anyway, just an option for consideration (not sure what happens though when your VHS is longer than 90 mins..you'd need a second miniDV tape..not sure if the deck stops the dub and waits - that would make the most sense, but we'd have to check the manual)..

edit: and by the way, although the tbc on the jvc above has worked well for me, it's not the same as a tbc-1000 for example...you could add a tbc-1000 to the above and feed analog out and then back in but that may preclude the dub unless you went w/ the 'professional' version of the same unit (which I think allowed simultaneus play on one deck and record on the other).

[swiego]

I'm somewhat comfortable managing the disk space issue. I have access to quite a bit of equipment on the PC side and wouldn't have a problem archiving to DLT tapes and keeping them in storage for a few years. I probably have at least ten terabytes worth of new SDLT tapes sitting around waiting to store uncompressed video. What I'm not sure I have the time, energy or or money to do is invest in IQ enhancement and restoration options available.

gshelly has done a fabulous job going through the various options and I have learned a great deal by reading just about every one of his posts! However it looks like proc amps and image detailers continue to evolve, whereas playback devices appear to have reached a pinnacle of sorts, just as cassette decks did over a decade ago. (Will we ever see new SVHS or 8mm or Hi8 players with better native output than what's available now? I suspect not...) Therefore I'd like to capture while the playback equipment is still fresh, reliable, and easy to buy & sell, and process/restore down the road when (a) HW/SW is better than it is today and/or (b) family starts bugging me asking for these videos on DVD! (By the time they get to asking, we'll have entered the age of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD anyway.

I followed this process a few years ago when digitizing all my 35mm film; I invested in the best possible capture capabilities I could get my hands on at the time, but didn't worry at all about printing. This turned out to be a good move b/c today $150 will buy me print quality and longevity that wasn't available under four-figures, five years ago. I'm wondering whether the same approach makes sense here.

[DaveS]

swiego - good update .. those DLT tapes could be very handy in this case...for your 100 tapes, how many hours worth of material are on each? Do you know the average? That will tell us what you can store on your 10TB of tape..(at least back of the envelope level of accuracy).

[swiego]

I would guesstimate 75 hours of footage that I would like to maintain digitally in best possible format for a few years. I have no doubt there is plenty of blank space in many of these tapes.

[DaveS]

in that case, 75 hours * 13 gig/hour in DV format = 975 gigs, or slightly less than 1TB. So you could capture each tape to disk, then write your avi files to DLT..you'd just want to make sure you can read them back when the time comes.

So, that gets back to the above post of a good playback VCR and a TBC and you should have good captures which you can tune up down the road. Your JVC deck will do a lot for you..I have a JVC and also a TBC-1000, and those two together can produce pretty good results. Also, make sure you have good cables, e.g. monster cables. They are expensive but worth it.

[swiego]

I've been using Acoustic Research Master Series cables, which are available on eBay at affordable prices and are ridiculously well-built. The s-video cable in particular has been extraordinary. I'm very happy with this series of cables and only wish that they were more flexible.

So, in your estimation, with the JVC and a good TBC like the TBC-x000, I needn't worry about "missing out" on an opportunity to fix something that later on might not be fixed? That is my suspicion. My reasoning is that the various image enhancers, processors and detailers out there are nothing more than either DSPs or analogue filters / processors of one kind or another. All of these things should someday be doable, in the digital domain, on a computer. Therefore, I can "wait" on these aspects of restoration until later. Whereas if I don't capture a signal with clean playback quality, quality time codes, or a decent cable, then quality is permanently lost. Does that sound reasonable? (Basically I'm looking for a reason to avoid this forum altogether before I spend more money!)

My only hesitation is this sinking feeling that, given a finite bit depth for the individual color channels in video (8-bit?), I could experience black level or clipping problems, or loss of dynamic range, if my black and white levels / brightness / etc is not adjusted properly prior to going into the capture card. I'm not sure if this is a meaningful concern, however.

[zoobie]

I'd sell your equipment while you can and just wait 24 months. Then, I'd take it to a studio with all the latest high-end equipment and let them clean/restore/convert to your final format.
I read where they're trying to develope a DVD disc with 20 gigs memory within the next 5 years...maybe sooner.
Everytime I read one of these threads, it reminds me of the time when I was in Switzerland and had collected this "stuff" worth about $30. I packed it into a small box to ship back to the States and found it was to cost me $80.
I threw it away.

My 2 scents...

[DaveS]

(Basically I'm looking for a reason to avoid this forum altogether before I spend more money!)

My only hesitation is this sinking feeling that, given a finite bit depth for the individual color channels in video (8-bit?), I could experience black level or clipping problems, or loss of dynamic range, if my black and white levels / brightness / etc is not adjusted properly prior to going into the capture card. I'm not sure if this is a meaningful concern, however.

For the purpose of putting home movies on DVD, I think you will be fine. If you are concerned about black level problems, you just need to make sure your equipment is all the same in terms of this, and you will be fine. Other than that, with a good vcr, a tbc and good cables, you will be very satisfied I think, except for tapes in really bad shape.

And, if the intention is to skip this forum, I would go with a DVD recorder. Either once now, or Blu ray / Hi Def in a few years (25gig or 30 gig respectively I believe, although I could be wrong). If you wait a bit, the recorders should get better at creating scene menus, which is really the only thing that is added on a PC instead of a dvd recorder. The encoding on a good DVD recorder works fine for this type of application.

If you do your tapes now on a DVD recorder, you will have them on DVD and will be done (apart from scene menus). If you wait, you may be creating more work for yourself, once to spin through all the tapes to get them on DLT and another time through all the DLT tapes, reading them and then encoding. VHS source being as poor as it is in general, especially from camcorders w/ not great lighting, etc,., it may just be easier to put them on DVD now w/ a recorder. I would believe that the current DVD format will be usable for many many years to come. And, you could always (or someone else) do this again in 25-30 years, DVD onto whatever the new format becomes. Or, put them on DLT now if you are concerned, but then in a few years, you could use a blu ray recorder w/ scene selection menu capability and do them directly off the VHS again, and if those fail, you'd have DLT backups for the one or two that might, and other than that, not spend a lot of time taking them off the DLTs. Food for thought...

[dphirschler]

Whatever you do, keep your original master tapes. You never know. I've come back to captures I did a couple years ago to finish them only to decide then that I needed to recapture them from the originals.


Darryl