Starting capturer blog?

[Spektre]

I am starting out in the converting of VHS to digital video. This has been by far the most helpful forum for questions. I'd like to post an ongoing monologue of my experiences while getting started thorugh hopefully the cleanup/restoration phase of my project. Is this forum an acceptable place to house this "blog"?

Spektre

[Spektre]

Seeing no complaints I'll start.

Entry 1:

Entry one begins 7 years ago when I started the project of capturing approximately 300 old home move VVS and VHS-C tapes. I moved my Hauppauge PVR-150 card from an older 450Mhz machine, where it had done "FreeVo" duties, to a new Athlon XP 2100. I captured a few tapes for friend and family that wanted DVDs made for practice. At the time, I had two major problems with my captures.

1. My time base corrector, a For-A model, did not have provisions for S-Video, only composite. The capture quality looked so much better via S-Video that it did via composite that the TBC became a non-factor which was disappointing for the investment.

2. All my captures had a strange strobing effect. In the early days of digital cameras I can remember this effect often on sports broadcasts. A golf swing, a tennis swing anything with fast motion looked as though it had been filmed with a very high speed strobe light. I never found an answer to this and thought perhaps my setup was non-optimal. This was despite the fact I was capturing at a very high bitrate.

Mostly for reason 2, I decided I was not ready to convert and dispose of family home videos.

Three years later, I revisited the project again with a new speedy Core2Duo processor, and a new PVR-150 card. Same strobing effect was noticed. Project shelved again.

To be continued.

[Brad]

Are comments okay? Strobing = jerkiness? How were your videos deinterlaced?

[Spektre]

Comments are most welcome and encouraged.

Strobing...as though the video where being filmed with a fast strobe light on. It was a common effect I saw even on many profession sport events of the time. They seem to have gotten the digital filming thing down now, but it used to be quite common.

Jerkiness would be a much slower phenomena.

Spektre

[jagabo]

Can you post a sample of your "strobing" effect? Maybe you're just seeing interlaced video on a progressive monitor? Or the result of a poor deinterlace?

[poisondeathray]

Dumb question, but did the original VHS tape play ok in the VHS player (no "strobing") ?

You said "often" ; this implies that it didn't occur all the time. Did you only notice it with "sports"

[jagabo]

Of course, sharp horizontal edges always flickered on interlaced TVs.

[Spektre]

Original VHS tape played fine on CRT or LCD.

It occured on all captures when motion occured. It affected the entire picture, not just edges or part of the picture.

I cannot post examples as this system is not built any longer.

Spektre

[Spektre]

Entry 2:

Flash forward to near present. I decide to dig into this again. Setup the system much as it was a few years ago with the Core 2 Duo and PVR-150. I have also acquired an Iden full frame time base corrector, that includes SVideo connections (YAY). However the system is now running Windows 7 and I note I have lost access to all the ProcAmp controls I used to have. I talk to the forum here @ videohelp.com and get unanimous support for moving away from the PVR-150 and to an ATI HD Wonder 600 PCIe device I also have.

Decide it is also a good time to reload Windows 7 so the system, which has been used as a torrents box in the interim, is clean before starting the project. After installing the 600 and reinstalling Windows 7, I note that I also have no ProcAmp controls with the ATI device.

After again asking the forum for help, it is narrowed down that the ATI HD Wonder 600 PCIe device driver does not allow access to the ProcAmp controls in Windows 7. Do a hunt through old CDs for a seemingly ancient copy of Windows XP. Begin to remember how installing XP and all updates is an all day affair. With Windows XP SP3 and all the updates installed on the system I look and sure enough I can access the ProcAmp controls again!

However a new problem has popped up. The system uses a HD5450 video card to allow HDMI out to my monitor/TV. In Windows XP, it appears MANY cards have a bug called the "silent stream". Whenever the system has been silent, it takes 2 seconds or so to "wake up" the audio stream, and you get silence for the first 2 seconds or so of a sound. Since most Windows sounds are short, they are completely lost. I am not sure this woud cause a big problem in capturing but it darn annoying and I use audio cues to make cuts. It also makes Windows difficult to use with no audio cues.

A call to ATI yields nothing useful. MSI, the maker of the card, is supposedly going to run a test to see if they can reproduce the problem.

If all else fails I can drop back to analog audio out to a pair of speakers, and wish I had a device that captured properly in Windows 7.

To be continued...

[jagabo]

However a new problem has popped up. The system uses a HD5450 video card to allow HDMI out to my monitor/TV. In Windows XP, it appears MANY cards have a bug called the "silent stream". Whenever the system has been silent, it takes 2 seconds or so to "wake up" the audio stream, and you get silence for the first 2 seconds or so of a sound.

Run a media player in the backgroud continuously playing a low (20 Hz?) or high (22 KHz?) frequency sound at a low level.

[Spektre]

Thanks jagabo,

There is actually someone who wrote a vb program that loops "silence". No sound but keeps the sound channel open.

I can go that route also, but am worried that leaving a resident program running while capturing will cause issues.

Spektre

[Spektre]

However a new problem has popped up. The system uses a HD5450 video card to allow HDMI out to my monitor/TV. In Windows XP, it appears MANY cards have a bug called the "silent stream". Whenever the system has been silent, it takes 2 seconds or so to "wake up" the audio stream, and you get silence for the first 2 seconds or so of a sound. Since most Windows sounds are short, they are completely lost. I am not sure this woud cause a big problem in capturing but it darn annoying and I use audio cues to make cuts. It also makes Windows difficult to use with no audio cues.

A call to ATI yields nothing useful. MSI, the maker of the card, is supposedly going to run a test to see if they can reproduce the problem.

If all else fails I can drop back to analog audio out to a pair of speakers, and wish I had a device that captured properly in Windows 7.

To be continued...

Just a quick update. MSI has also been worthless claiming they tested this in XP and do not have the issue.

[Spektre]

OK,

So I now have my rig setup with an NVidea card that does not suffer from the HDMI 'silent stream' bug.

Running through a few tests to test out the I.DEN IVT-7 TBC units I notice significant ringing through the units when not in bypass mode. It is of course most noticeable on test patterns or when sharp edges occur (such as when the tape is stop and the screen is blue with just the word "STOP" shown)

I am running from the SVHS deck through SVideo cables to the TBC, then via Svideo cables again to the ATI capture card.

I have not used TBCs before (save an old For.A unit which didn't get used due to lacking an SVideo path).

Is ringing a normal artifact of most TBCs that you just tend to live with? I have 3 units here of the same model which all exhibit the same behavior. I do not think it is a cabling noise issue as the same cables do not exhibit the problem when in bybass mode on the TBC.

I'll try and in thread question, but if it lacks visibility here, I'll give it its own thread.

Thanks

[jagabo]

Ringing is often caused by over sharpening. Are you sure it's the TBC causing it not the ATI capture card? Bad cables or termination can cause ringing too. But you seem to have ruled out the cables.

[Spektre]

Fairly certain. The TBC has a Bypass button on it. When in Bypass the ringing is not there (the ATI card is still in the chain). The TBC has a rudimentary ProcAmp on it, but shapening is not a controlable function.

Spektre

[jagabo]

Doesn't sound good. Is this from VHS caps or something sharper?

[Spektre]

The ringing (as I mentioned) is mostly visible when STOP or EJECT is displayed in white letters on theblue background generated by the VCR.

[jagabo]

The ringing (as I mentioned) is mostly visible when STOP or EJECT is displayed in white letters on theblue background generated by the VCR.

Ah. That is probably sharper than normal a normal VHS video signal. The TBC is probably running a sharpening filter (expecting low res VHS) so it ends up over sharpening the already sharp text.