ES15 as TBC in combo with Panasonic NV-FS200?

[mathijsmathijs]

Hello everyone,

I am digitizing old VHS tapes using the Black Magic Intensity Shuttle USB3. As a playback device I have a Panasonic NV-FS200, with built-in TBC.
After having upgraded the VHS player to this model, black flash-frames (dropouts) have lessened, but they still occur during capture. Audio starts to drift off sync after a while.

My question: would it be useful for this kind of problem to place a Panasonic ES15 between the VHS player and capture device, or would the results be minimal? Would this make the dropouts go away? Or is it no use, considering the fact that the NV-FS200 does not solve the problem?
I also read about the way the ES15 messes up a lot of the colors. If the device is unable to solve the frame dropouts, I would rather not buy it.

I have read a few threads on this forum, but being a technical novice, I thought I'd better just ask to be sure. Thanks in advance and sorry if I have asked questions that have been answered often already.

Setup: Panasonic NV-FS200 > scart to composite adapter > Black Magic Intensity Shuttle USB3 (composite in) > MB Pro - 2,3 GHZ quad core i5 - 8GB RAM (Blackmagic Media Express software to capture).

Kind regards,
Mathijs

[themaster1]

some info on video dropout: https://bavc.github.io/avaa/artifacts/video_dropout.html
an audio dropout: https://bavc.github.io/avaa/artifacts/audio_dropout.html

[mathijsmathijs]

Thanks. I am confusing terminology here. There are no dropouts - I am
seeing ‘flash frames’, as in entirely black frames spread throughout the video. Sometimes there are less when I repeatedly play the video, sometimes there are more.

[lordsmurf]

ES15 is not a TBC, nor TBC replacement.

It does have some TBC-like properties, and can suffice for a narrow type of homemade/homeshot sources. But in general, it will not supercede the need for timebase correction with a known-good model/brand of TBC (especially for consumer sources like VHS and Hi/Video8).

ES10/15 units also have side effects that do not happen with TBCs, including posterization (color palette compression) and NR (even when NR is off). These units aggressively filter video, which can be both good or bad depending on the sources.

Again, not a TBC.

FYI: Blackmagic also reacts horribly to SD sources like VHS, so that could be part of your problem. It's an HD card with a pathetic afterthought "feature" of also capturing SD. There is a reason that so many "I have problems!" posts in recent months/years are always from BM users. The card sucks at VHS work.

[mathijsmathijs]

Thanks for the response! I don’t think I will use the ES15 in this case. Too bad to hear about bad results from BM, I’ve had good experiences with their products so far - as long as you keep expectations within the semi-pro range.

[oln]

From what I know about the PAL (Presuming it's pal since you have a NV-FS200 which is a PAL mode) ES15, it (or for that many other panasonics) should work reasonably well. Not aware of it causing posterization like the US one, though it may clip brights a little. I've used the PAL ES10 (predecessor) and EH57 (slightly newer, with HDD/HDMI), both generally work well other than the clipping issue (so one needs to reduce the video levels going into the recorder a little). It may not work as well if there is macrovision on the tape though. Since you have a BM capturing from the component output from the DVD-Recorder may work the best.

On another note, you should use the S-Video out from the VCR rather than composite. Not going to fix the image going black (which is an inherent issue with the BM intensity and unstable video sources), but you will avoid some video artifacts caused by Y/C (colour/brightness) being mixed together in composite.

[Eric-jan]

There's nothing wrong with the Intensity Shuttle itself, it only needs a steady NTSC/PAL signal, the s-video signal does not much differ from composite signal, better have a VHS deck that outputs component (YUV) video, most of the time such a deck also delivers a steady video signal, The Intensity Shuttle is overkill when only using it with composite or s-video, also, when capturing in uncompressed format your storage device must be able to handle the transfer rate during the capture, you could try, by means of a test, to use one of the compressing codecs, you then know, that, there's nothing wrong with capturing, but maybe you have slow storage during capture.

(btw. the JVC HR-S8960 gives a good enough video signal over s-video or composite, i know, with mine Intensity Shuttle here, but i'm using the Panasonic DMR-ES35V (which has component video out)
maybe there are some "close relatives" to the HR-S8960, that also give good results with the Intensity Shuttle, having a good VHS deck is the most important thing to have)