VHS Capture Guidance Requested

[Dark-knight]

Good lord the amount of information out there.... I've read tons of guides, explanations, and articles. My eyes are bleeding, and my head just might explode. I'm not lost, but I'm sort of suffering from information paralysis here. Most of the info is like 8 years old now. There is a lot of information regarding capturing for VHS, lots of opinions, and I'm having a hard time proceeding. Let me start at the beginning.

I've got a 25-50 stack of old VHS home movies, made with an old VHS camcorder from the late 80's and early 90's. For the most part, my dad used high quality tapes, and these movies (while not HD ) are still very watchable. The old VCRs we used to use to watch these like a decade ago don't read the tapes correctly any more. One of them is even a higher end JVC with editing jogs on the remote and deck. Anyway, I'm not sure if it's the tape or the deck. The decks worked when I packed them away, but whatever.

The only 4 head VHS I could find locally was a Magnavox ZV427MG9. It's a VHS->DVD recorder, but I'm not using it for converting the tapes to dvd. I did a few tests and the results are not very clean. It seems a bit noisier than the actual tape, but still watchable.

I had been using an old ATI AIW 9700 pro when I started this, but the computer that is in was too slow for quality capturing, so that got boxed years ago.

I picked up a Dazzle DVC-100 (or 107?) capture device. I works nicely with the S-Video from the VCR. I've done many captures from some of these tapes. I've only captured directly to DV, but it seems to produce decent results, though I have nothing to compare it to.

There in lies the problem. I have nothing to compare my captures to at all. Further, I've taken steps to clean up some of the captures and they seem to look good to me, but I don't know.


My questions:


Hardware:

Is my capture hardware (VHS deck & Capture device) "good enough"? Is there anything particularly poor about either of these devices that would preclude making a quality capture? There is a lot of hate surrounding the DVC-100 on it's associated thread here, but most of those revolve around the crappy capture software that I'm not even using.

I know what a TBC is. However, I'm not seeing TBC problems (as I understand it) from the tapes I've looked at so far. Would there be any measurable improvement in quality if I spent the $100 to get one from amazon or something?


Software:

I made a full capture of a 1hr video using Pinnacle's studio software (not moviestudio). I didn't have a single problem. It simply worked. I captured to DV, and I ended up with a 12.7GB video. The test tape I am using doesn't have any visible speakers, so it's hard to tell if the audio/video is in sync, but other test captures I've made with other videos aren't showing desyncing issues.

I had worked with this in premiere, and used Neat Video noise reduction, which made a huge impact in how the clip looked. However, the video is interlaced, so I was thinking I'd like to deinterlace it. Premiere's deinterlace options didn't really look that good, so I took a look at Virtualdub.

Virtualdub's deinterlace options (taking into consideration other available plugins) are complex. I think I had settled on smart deinterlace 2.8B1. However, I was struggling getting the settings correct for that, and it occurred to me that I had compressed the video twice already, once during capture and again during export, and that I would have done a 3rd DV compression when I ran it though virtualdub's deinterlace.


Capturing:

To avoid those losses I thought it might be a good idea to recapture it uncompressed, or compressed in a lossless codec. Unfortunately, Pinnacle's software only allows for DV or mpeg2 capture. I started exploring alternatives, and there are only two: Virtualdub and DScaler. DScaler (4.1.1.9 & 422) are buggy at best and crash while trying to tweak the video, so that just leaves Virtualdub.

It seems like Virtualdub has better facilities for capturing anyway, and I can capture it to huffyuv or lagarith lossless codecs, so any edits can be done without compression losses.

I'm starting to run into problems using Virtualdub, because I can't get it to display the video and the histogram at the same time. Only one or the other will update. At some point while I was playing with DScaler with Virtualdub open in the background, the video and histogram both started working correctly. I made some adjustments, and the video dropped out again after testing if I should capture @ 720x480 or 640x480 (btw which should I use?). I have been unable to reproduce whatever caused the video to show up.

So I'm now at the point where I'm playing with the histogram to get the video to look better, and I was trying to follow Luke's guide, but I'm getting an odd looking graph when I turn the contrast up beyond a certain point. It looks like sawteeth instead of a continuous mountain, but the video doesn't look materially different. I don't know what this means.


Beyond that, there seems to be a lot of suggestions for filter chains to use in VD for VHS cleanup that tell you to get outdated, or hard to get filters. To be honest, I don't even know if they are needed in the first place, as the guides don't give clear visual examples of what we are trying to eliminate.

I'd basically just like some input on how I should proceed, or if I should even bother if the hardware is total crap.


Thanks.

[DB83]

Well my head hurts just reading that. Much of which is irrelevant to the topic.

1. Yes. Capture lossless if you can.
2. Is your hardware/software good enough ? People will have opinions - if they have used them but many on here will not. So a better indication is to upload a short representative sample with movement, people talking etc.
3. Sound sync issues could be your hardware or even your PC especially if capping over usb and on one harddrive (I do see you have more)

And if the info is 8 years old what gives ? Most is still relevant now.

[redwudz]

It sounds like you have gotten along fairly well so far. I finished converting about 150 old VHS tapes of old TV episodes to MKV a few months ago. (I got tired of looking at them in the bookcase )

I just bought a cheap used JVC VHS deck off Ebay. I had three old quality VHS decks and every one had problems due to age and storage. I decided if I needed some higher end equipment, the tapes would go in the dumpster instead.

I used a ADVC 100 to capture to DV, then filtered in VD Mod, then used Handbrake to convert to H.264 MKV. In VD Mod, I mostly cropped out the VHS noise and did some color correction with Color Mill II.

DV isn't lossless, but it doesn't have as much generational loss as other formats like Divx or H.264. I outputted from VDM in DV format with the Cedocida DV Codec and stayed away from lossless codecs. If I needed audio filtering, I used Audacity, then muxed it back with the audio in VDM. I used VDM as I like it's interface better than the newer VD.

VD is a great editor, but not so great for playback or monitoring. Just something I live with.

For VD filters, check out: http://www.infognition.com/VirtualDubFilters/

My method isn't a 'purist' method, but it works for me.

And welcome to our forums.

[Dark-knight]

Well my head hurts just reading that. Much of which is irrelevant to the topic.

Sorry I was trying to be as through as possible.

1. Yes. Capture lossless if you can.
2. Is your hardware/software good enough ? People will have opinions - if they have used them but many on here will not. So a better indication is to upload a short representative sample with movement, people talking etc.
3. Sound sync issues could be your hardware or even your PC especially if capping over usb and on one harddrive (I do see you have more)

I will make some more test captures and find some place to post them. AFAIK, I'm not having any sync issues or dropped frames. The r/w speeds on that 1TB HDD are significantly faster than the USB2 bus, it's not even seeing high utilization. I see very little load over all system during capping.

And if the info is 8 years old what gives ? Most is still relevant now.

Not when you can't find the filters, or the software is so out of date it doesn't work. Even worse is when guides link to a website that is supposed to explain something important, and the site doesn't even exist any more.


Regardless, I'm grateful for your input. I'll get to work on it now.

[sanlyn]

Stay with lossless Lagarith or Huffyuv in YUY2 color; in both the long and short run, since you intend to do some cleanup, lossless will give the cleanest results. That means, in short, the advantage of only one encode and the added advantage of being able to archive your lossless capture, modify the results later without loss, and encode to different formats without loss as well. Another advantage is lossless upsizing to 1240x720 for HD, although the source should be in fairly decent shape for that to work and is immaterial where plain 4:3 output is concerned.

You can capture to either 640x480 or 720x480 (i use the former, usually), but in the end your video will encode at 720x480. However....resizing is best done with Avisynth, not VirtualDub.

Why are you deinterlacing? For PC-only playback, that would be a requirement. But DVD is usually interlaced, or telecined. Here's another problem: if you've recorded some movies, they're likely telecined in some way. You don't deinterlace telecined video. I suggest that if it must be done (sometimes tapes require so much industrial-strength cleaning that it's best deinterlaced or inverse telecined) you should be using Avisynth, not Premiere, VirtualDub, or some other NLE. Avisynth has vastly superior facilities for what you're talking about. That doesn't preclude NeatVideo (I have 3 versions of it myself and 6 copies on 4 PC's) but it does require RGB, and converting YUV to RGB can be done properly or improperly -- most users who don't know the difference will usually have luma and chroma problems doing it the latter way. I'd further suggest that while I find NeatVideo almost essential for problem VHS tape, some of those problems are best and more easily fixed in YUV using Avisynth before the vid ever sees RGB. NV, for example, won't clean spots, comets, dropouts, shimmer, frame hop, rainbows, rips, aliasing, excess interlace combing, and a number of other bad guys. The RGB work copy will have to be reconverted to YUV for encoding; there are proper and improper ways of doing that, too. Many encoders will do it for you (many won't), but Avisynth has better ways of getting there.

The difference would be between results that are tolerable and results you wouldn't mind showing off to others. I'll be the first to admit that as a long-time user of VirtualDub (and I still use it, regularly), I was dragged kicking and screaming into Avisynth. Now, I wouldn't work without it. It can be approached as a basic-use utility that uses simple methods and filters, or you can take it as far as you wish. I'm an advocate of using Avisynth and VDub in conjunction. There are some things you simply can't do in VirtualDub, and some things require Avisynth. I've used many NLE's in the past and disliked all of them, with the exception of After Effects Pro (in which I work only with lossless AVI and encode later with better encoders).

At this point we could only give general advice because we don't know what your videos look like. You can submit short samples of MPEG or even losslessly compresssed AVI of "problem" videos in the forum if you need more detail.

[lordsmurf]

Capture info/advice/methods hasn't changed in 10 years.

For less than 50 tapes, it's often cheaper + easier to pay a professional to do it for you.

You need a good VCR, a TBC, and a good capture card.
Without those, the quality is going to be crappy.

[Dark-knight]

So, I've been trying to find good examples of clips to post. I've been through 4 or 5 tapes. One of the tapes from 1991 looks like it was made yesterday. The video is so clean, if you were watching it on the TV we had back then, you wouldn't know to expect any difference. Some of the other videos were more problematic. The camera liked to periodically adjust it's brightness in a kind of slow burst pattern. I'm trying to find a good section with a fair amount of motion, but the subjects are somewhat far from the camera, and I'm worried about scrubbing the tape too much to find what I need.

Seems like no two tapes (in the admittedly small sample) have the same problems.


You know, I think I still have the camera that they were filmed on lying around in it's briefcase. I haven't even taken it out in 10+ years. Assuming it worked correctly, would it be a better source to use instead of the Magnavox? I doubt it has S-video on it, I think it was purchased prior to that being a common standard.

[Dark-knight]

Here are two 30 second or so clips. The first one is of the very first tape we made. It's got a fair amount of motion with subjects in the distance and upclose. It's representative of the quality I see on most of the test captures. The second clip is a couple years newer, and is one of the cleaner tapes I have. Both were made with the same camera, and captured using the same settings @ 720x480. I've also attached a screen shot of the levels & histogram.



As a side note, I figured out how to get VD to display the histogram and the video with both updating. Preview and filter chain both have to be enabled. I previously had filter chain disabled because I had been testing different filters in there, and didn't want them to apply on capture. It caused the histogram to stop updating, or the video to not show depending on Overlay/Preview selection.

[lordsmurf]

The original camera is better only when it has severe tracking alignment issues.
And it doesn't sound like it's the case.

[2Bdecided]

I've only captured directly to DV, but it seems to produce decent results, though I have nothing to compare it to.

Yes you do. Author the raw capture to DVD (the version before you started to improve it), and watch it on the same TV as the VHS directly.

Have the lightest and darkest parts been clipped/washed out? Is it wobbling more? Have vertical lines become jagged? Are there blocks/noise that weren't present before? If not, rejoice in your good fortune!


When "improving" the video on the PC, be careful not to overdo it. At first PC denoising looks like magic - but the result can look like plastic!

There in lies the problem. I have nothing to compare my captures to at all.

Ignorance is bliss. Happiness should not be poked to see if it can be made to depart.


You're doing everything wrong (cheap VCR, no TBC, lousy capture card) but getting decent results. Your tapes are in great shape.


The only thing I can see wrong is that the levels recorded by the original camcorder aren't ideal. However, you seem to be capturing everything it laid down well enough (CAVEAT: from those two small samples!), so you have all the information there to fix it up later if you wish.

Unfortunately, Pinnacle's software only allows for DV or mpeg2 capture.

Stick with DV then.

It seems like Virtualdub has better facilities for capturing anyway, and I can capture it to huffyuv or lagarith lossless codecs, so any edits can be done without compression losses.

EDITS don't introduce compression issues with DV - only actual processing.

I'd basically just like some input on how I should proceed, or if I should even bother if the hardware is total crap.

The HW is total crap but the results are fine so just be happy!


Learn AVIsynth.
Don't deinterlace for DVD. Stick with 720x480i.
Only deinterlace for YouTube/facebook.
Keep your original DV-AVI captures, and your "improved" versions.


Some people will tell you that you must use lossless. I often use lossless for intermediate stages I don't intend to keep. For all the people who tell you to capture lossless, no one has ever posted an example where using DV looked visibly inferior. Lossless can't hurt if you have the space and time and it captures OK. If any of those things is a problem, you're banging your head against a brick wall for no visible benefit.


Cheers,
David.



P.S. stop wearing the original tapes out trying lots of different things. They look great. If you're happy with the results, get them captured while you have the time and working equipment!

[sanlyn]

Agreed, considering the gear used the captures look OK with levels, etc. The "problem child" I'm playing with now is your Capture1. Not a bad effort, really; but, alas, consumer cameras in dark light capture mostly noise "down there", not much video data. You can filter the devil to get rid of all of it, but you won't have much video left. Capture2 looks easy enough with a little color work, and I can come up with a fix for the "flashing" frames. I'm playing with the grunge in Capture1 now -- a little like a kid playing in mud.

[sanlyn]

That test-capture1.avi is a real tease. You start removing noise, thinking you'll find some goodies. But all you find underneath is more noise. Low-light with consumer cameras is a drag; in low artificial light they record mostly noise, especially in the darks, and autocolor changes hue whenever something moves, as happens in Capture1. Starts bluish, gets yellow, starts heading for blue again at the end. If users knew that it was impossible to fix this effect, they wouldn't use anything "auto". Or maybe they would.

There's more noise here than one would suspect (look at the top border(). By the time 75% of the noise was gone, 50% of the video was gone with it. The absence of actual data was masked with dithering and fine grain filters. The tape is deteriorating; colors are corrupt. As with all VHS, there is very little shadow detail.

NeatVideo was part of the madness here, at the very end. I think I should have skipped it. Will post the script that gave me the attached mkv later, as soon as I'm able to remember what the hell I did.

[Dark-knight]

If users knew that it was impossible to fix this effect, they wouldn't use anything "auto". Or maybe they would.

Thank you for taking a look at the clip and giving me your advice/opinion.


Cap 1 was the day my dad got the camera, that clip was part of the first 5 minutes of footage it ever shot. You can kind of see me in the front, sitting on the floor about midway through the clip, playing with a new walkman. I don't think he was aware at the time of the intricacies of filming, or for that matter if the consumer camera was any good. It was a gift and I think he was excited just to have it. In any case, the TV it's sitting on was rather small, and if we ever watched these back then (we didn't), I don't think any of us would have thought twice about the fidelity.


You know, at one point, I think he was pretty serious about it. He bought an analog hardware editing board that would do wipes and make picture adjustments with it's various sliders in real time, as well as a (I think) nice JVC deck with a jog remote to compliment the panasonic we already had.


Maybe the video would have looked better 10 years ago? Wouldn't have mattered, I had no facility for capturing it, or ability to pay someone to do it. It was a battle just to get my wife to agree to the purchase of the deck and capture device I have now -- sadly before I knew it really made a difference.


I guess my question is, if any of the above mentioned defects (e.g. hue shifting) would be improved upon by using a more professional deck? The earliest I'd be able to get a better deck *might* be April, and that's another 6 months of time that these tapes will sit. If the capture is roughly as good as it can get given the source tape (even using better hardware), then it may be wiser just to use my current equipment.


Thoughts?

[sanlyn]

I hope we don't sound hyper-critical. One can hardly be held to account for a 15 to 25-year-old tape made with a brand-new camera. We see many such videos. One can improve them (sometimes), but no one can make them look like something else. If you have a number of such recordings around, it does help to add a touch of brightness to the dark end (and be careful with highlights, too). But it's a fact that there are some things consumer cameras just ain't good at. JUst be aware that low-density recordings are more problematic than they seem at first.

If hue shifts are in the tape, there's little one can do. You can get fancy with dissolves and masks that take forever to devise, but pro equipment along the lines of Industrial Light & Magic is really the way to do it -- and bring your M.I.T. degree with you. Considering the hardware/software available, I'd say it's a decent job of capturing a real "problem" tape. A better VCR would obviously have less noise, probably cleaner color, less bristly edge noise, etc., but finding one of those high-enders that still works and won't destroy your tape is a trip in itself. One improvement could be a used DVD recorder that can be used as a line-level tbc pass-thru device. Use the DVDR not to record directly, but to make use of its tbc circuitry as it is used to "play" a tape from VCR thru the pass-thru unit and into a capture device. Not all DVD-R's can be used for this. There are several threads that discuss the few brands and models from Panasonic and Toshiba circa 2000-2005 that work well. Newer machines just don't cut the mustard.

Tape damage (such as Capture 2) is a nightmare, of course, even if plain old VHS in decent shape wasn't trouble enough.

Will try to reassemble my script and filter list in the A.M. , when I'm awake enough to find my own notes.

[Dark-knight]

I hope we don't sound hyper-critical.

No, you don't. Truly, I'm grateful for the advice. I'd rather know what/where the problems are, and if there is anything I can (realistically) do about them now in the capture stage, before I put any more wear on these tapes trying to capture.


In what way is the second capture considered tape damage? I had thought that to be one of the nicer looking tapes.


Also, I have a line on a used AG1980 deck that I'd consider haggling for if you guys thought it would improve my results. Though I've read they commonly have capacitor issues...

[2Bdecided]

Maybe the video would have looked better 10 years ago?

I don't think it shows any signs of deterioration - especially given there's nothing in your capture chain to hide any faults. I bet it looked like that the day it was shot. As you say, expectations were lower then - it was cool just to have a camcorder! Auto modes have improved over the years.

Cheers,
David.

[sanlyn]

I have a line on a used AG1980 deck that I'd consider haggling for if you guys thought it would improve my results. Though I've read they commonly have capacitor issues...

Finding a Panny or high-end JVC in good working order is a hassle, and pristine or refurbed units go for as much as the seller can get -- not to mention rare. For more details on better VCR's, look for forum posts by user name orsetto. I've owned three high-end JVC's (four, actually, counting an out-of-the-box defect). Two from the late 1990's had a short life; the brand new one developed problems after a month. I haven't found an AG1980 that was affordable or in good shape. I've acquired some non-tbc Panasonics from 1996-1998 (anything later than that is trash except for a few AG's), a rebuilt 1991 SONY, and I use DVD recorders as pass-thru line tbc's. JVC's from the mid-90's seem to be above par players; I used to own one, but being young and stupid I sold it when I moved.

In what way is the second capture considered tape damage? I had thought that to be one of the nicer looking tapes.

It is one of the better looking ones, and is certainly ahead of Capture-1. At least it doesn't require major denoising therapy. But once you start working with it and getting more familiar with video, you notice a few things. The image below is frame 81 of Capture-2.


[Attachment 20635 - Click to enlarge]

Color is good and it's not very noisy. But...notice the top border. That noise can be cropped and replaced with black pixels to maintain the original image aspect ratio. This is an interlaced frame, so the edges of the flag show combing because it's moving (it won't appear on TV or a deinterlacing player). However, there's a "rip" or noisy horizontal twitter located in the upper right in the bright street, just to the right of the tall pole. Load the AVi into virtualDub and play it frame by frame: when you get to frame 81, you'll see a horizontal blip along the bright curb and street. It occurs in later frames as well. In this case, if you separate the interlaced fields you'll see that the rip begins in the odd field of frame 80, and occurs in even and odd fields of frame 81.

There's a bad vertical frame hop in frame 337. That's where some noise starts in the top border and in frames 340, 343-348, 350-354, 743, and 754-760.

If you slightly enlarge the video in VirtualDub, look at the dark shadow and grass at the bottom of the frame while playing at normal speed. There's a mild luma flicker (rapid fluctuations in brightness) down there. Not difficult to fix, but visible.

Brightness flares that are more visible are in frames 341-342, 409-411, 570-574, 745-751, and 868-872. These can be only partially repaired.

A few other things to notice about frame 81 that are not "damage" but are typical playback problems. Look in the upper right corner and to the right of the big tree trunk, between the tree and the right border. There's an orange "twitter" there. I don't think it's from the sun, because the shadows don't indicate the sun is in that location. It occurs in frames 0 to 223.

Frame 81 also shows other, typical VHS problems: edge halos and edge ghosting. The image below is a 2X blowup from the top right corner of frame 81. Notice black artifacts on the left-side edges. There are bright right-hand halos, with darker edge ghosts to the right of the halos and elsewhere (look at the edge of the tall pole, the top edge of the tress, etc.):


[Attachment 20636 - Click to enlarge]

Another common defect that's noticeable playing back at large frame sizes: dot crawl and chroma sampling errors. The image below is a 3X blowup from a portion of Capture-2 frame 895:


[Attachment 20637 - Click to enlarge]

Note the dot and crosshatch pattern, especially on red. This is difficult to clean and never really goes away. It's from a combination of the connection used (usually composite) and the capture device. It's common with VHS captures; you can almost depend on seeing it in some form, but it's pretty obvious here.

The image below is a 2X blowup of a portion of original frame 572 from the earlier Capture-1. The same pattern, more obvious in the reds. This is from the unprocessed Capture-1:


[Attachment 20638 - Click to enlarge]

Below, the same area from the filtered mkv posted. There are remnants of the problem, but now it's less obvious:


[Attachment 20639 - Click to enlarge]

[Dark-knight]

The top border is there either from the capture device itself or the VCR. Those lines are there even if I playback from a dvd. I think it's just beyond the range of the video output. I used to see something similar from my ATI AIW, but IIRC it looked more like moving tear, but always a handful of lines at the very top.

My connection is via a decent svideo cable.


I did notice the crosshatch pattern in most of my video captures, but didn't think about what might be causing it.


https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/267778-S-Video-capture-produces-crosshatch-noise


It occurs to me that this might by my fault for my placement of the VCR and it's cables too near RF devices. I've been working in the digital space so long, I just took for granted that if I got a picture, it was the same one that was transmitted. I never even stopped to consider analog interference.


Space is limited around my desktop and my networking equipment isn't very far away. The cable on the capture device is more than long enough for me to relocate it & the VCR further away from that noise, and it may help clear it up.


Thank you so much for taking the time to look at my clips. Everyone's help here is invaluable to me, particularly you sanlyn.


I'll get everything moved around and (hopefully) get back to you tonight.

[Dark-knight]

When I was looking to relocate the VCR & capture device, I thought it might be good to watch one or two of the movies on the last TV we had when these movies were made. It's an old 27" Proscan CRT. It would have been what we expected to get back out of the movies, so if I can meet or even beat that a little, then I think I can live with the results. Maybe it won't be CSI level of detail extraction, but I think it could provide some needed perspective so I can have realistic expectations.

I built a shelf inside of a large closet a good ways away from any RFI generating electronics to house the TV & VCR. Even broke out my old SNES and hooked it up for a bit. If I'm going through this much trouble digging up bones, I might as well go all the way, right?


The text from the VCR menu, is so damn fuzzy for some reason; pressed movie DVDs aren't so bad though. I'm not sure if the tube is just old, or if CRTs were that bad and I just forgot having not used one for so long. In any case, it's clear fricken HD has spoiled me, and I'm afraid to watch 4K for any length of time.

[sanlyn]

I'm not quite certain what capture device you're using. But I see that you're using VirtualDub's capture software, which is agood idea. VDub has good flexibility even if some feature are ba bit clunky; at least VDub in itself doesn't harm a capture, it just transmits whatever is served to it by the capture device.

We've seen dot crawl and chro0ma sampling errors (that cross-hatch and dot grid stff) on many caotures. It almost alays comes down to the capture adapter itself. I see you mention the ATI AIW 9600Pro, which was an excellent capture card that many are dying to get their hands on. I can't see how the PC on which you used it could be all that slow, as that card was designed for use with Windows 98 to XP, which were developed long before quad-core, 2-plus GHz PC's, and faster RAM came along. Possibly you mean that the PC was too slow for capture with ATI's own Media Center, which would be more likely. I wouldn't recommend using MMC anyway: VirtualDub will recognize that card if ATI's drivers are installed. I used that card with VDub and the 9600XT on a 1.3Ghz 2001 PC that had only 256 MB of DDR1 RAM. I even had a friend who used that card in an old Celeron machine from 1999. Granted, I wouldn't try today's heavy-duty plugins or even NeatVideo with those old tanks, but I had no capture problems. The last capture I made from VHS was about 2 months ago using a home-built Athlon X2 2GHz with very old DDR2 RAM and an ATI AIW 7500 from 2000 that I originally had on a Windows 98 machine.

Hopefully your current effort will reolve the problem. Keep us updated.

[Dark-knight]

http://www.amazon.com/Dazzle-Video-Creator-Plus-VERSION/dp/B001C5DOWI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UT...dazzle+dvc+107

^^^ Is what I'm currently using.


I didn't know virtual dub could use the AIW. I can dig out the old ATI, it's a 9800pro AIW. I still have all the break-out boxes & cables to go with it. I'll have to reassemble a PC with an AGP port, but that's nothing -- I've got a mountain of hardware laying around. As I recall, the trouble was with MMC making poor captures, so I think this is worth a shot. In fact, I remember the specific issue was that the tapes were playing back poorly on the VCRs I was using at the time. It was creating macrovision like problems, and I had trouble getting the right MMC driver that corrected that. I did ultimately get that driver, and it fixed the video, but then there was another issue with the audio I think. I remember it being that I could only have "one or the other", so I gave up for the time. This was like 10 years ago, when I first looked into being able to digitize these movies, so I can't remember clearly.


I got distracted yesterday repairing that TV. Had some cold solder joints in the Pincusion circuit that was causing picture issues. I fixed that, but after sleeping on it, I think I can remedy the focusing/convergence issues I'm seeing near the edges of the screen. I'm just tired of taking the damn back cover off. My dad used to repair TVs in the 60's & 70's. I think he'd get a kick out of me fixing his old TV to watch our old home movies.

[sanlyn]

I recall having occasional problems with MMC of one kind or another, finally got it straightened out but stopped using it when I realized how much mor flexible it was to capture VHS to lossless AVI. And I didn't lose the overscan area, which MMC insisted on cropping. MMC refused to manage macrovision (but even a DVD recorder will have the same problem). You need a full-frame tbc for that, or a pass-thru unit that ignores macrovision (mine do). A line-level tbc made a vast difference. Unfortunately7, stand-alone line-level jobs are available only in those high end VCR's that everyone mentions (yet no one quotes a source for workable units except for the eBay and Craig's List lotteries) or in really expensive pro units that require support gear.

Drivers for the AGP AIW's stopped with XP. MMC isn't needed anyway; the essentials are the basic driver, control panel, and WDM capture. The best of that software predates 2005, up to about Cat v4.5. It's impossible to find the old drivers, but I have copies around. If you have the original AIW disc, that will do. Good luck with the hardware. Who care if it's not brand new, as long as it works?

I'd like to have our deceased CRT back online myself. Alas, today's godawful LCD's are a more stringent test for proper denoising, levels, and other factors. CRT's were too forgiving, too well debugged after 100 years of development, and they made it look too easy.

[lordsmurf]

The official drivers stopped, yes.
But I've managed to get it running under Vista and 7.

The problem is re-creating it. Some systems work, some do not. Some cards do, some do not.
But I think I can fix this. I've spent the past year trying. And I'm close!

I hope to have the ATI All In Wonders working by Dec of this year.

[sanlyn]

Guess I'm fortunate that I decided to get 2 AGP boards just as they were disappearing from online sites 5 years ago. Some people told me I was wasting my time, but now they're seeing these used boards and cards going for up to 2 and 3 times their original price. Since then I same across a DELL desktop with AGP slot, nothing wrong with it except the customer just didn't want a 3GHz single-core Intel or XP any more (they wanted Vista. You can guess what happened after that). All of these are a tad slow for many modern plugins; they just choke on HD. But they run AIW's and capture like champs. With 200 hours of old tapes yet to go, I'll be getting my money's worth.

[2Bdecided]

If the scare stories are to be believed, disconnect those XP machines from the internet (and any other potential source of virus or attack) before April next year.

...and having done that, consider how inconvenient it just became to get your captures off those machines onto a decent one.


(do as I say, not as I do. I still have a Win98 machine, though only briefly on a network).

[sanlyn]

You mean faster is always better? I hear thinner is always better, too.

Maybe in a couple of years when I finish capturing those 200 hours of tapes. It doesn't take much time at all to copy a capture with DriveImage or Paragon onto other drives, where I archive many of them anyway. Then I can get rid of those XP's and get into newer, more secure software so I can spend 90% of my time downloading security updates on my Win 7 machines. In the meantime I do make a pretty good living on the side removing adware, trojans, and other nasties from Windows 7 and 8 PC's. What can I say: it's a living. I often play PacMan on the XP while the scanning utilities clean up the new ones in my customer's' home. Often, the customers play too.

I might have you beat. I still have a Windows 3.1 laptop with a dual boot to DOS 6.2.

[lordsmurf]

I have one of the hard-to-find i7 AGP boards.

[sanlyn]

Say. That's an accomplishment in itself. Hope it goes well.

[Dark-knight]

I have one of the hard-to-find i7 AGP boards.

What board? AGP was long dead by the time the Core i# series debuted. I didn't think there was any board made with an AGP slot with LGA 1156/1366..

[Dark-knight]

Well, the ATI idea is out. Its been a god damned nightmare trying to get this working. I got all my parts together out of the boxes I had them in, but I was pretty sick and fatigued when I put the whole thing together. I left an extra standoff under the motherboard! Fried two PSUs and an AMD 4000. Before I realised it was the CPU that had died, I assumed it was the motherboard, so I bought another one on eBay. $45 wasted. It took me a while, but I realised the PSUs were bad anyway, the secondary caps are about to burst. So I picked up another PSU and swapped out the CPU with a 4800x2 I had, put the card in and booted up. Everything looks good, so I install windows and start running updates. I go down stairs and watch TV with my wife for a few hours and when I get back, the damn screen is corrupted! The video card either overheated, or it took some damage from the failed PSU. I'm so ******* angry. That card cost me $400 new when I got it. I've never had so much trouble with any hardware before, and none of this would have happened if I had just gone to bed instead of working on it tired.

Anyway, I'm open to new suggestions regarding what I should use for a capture device, because this whole damn project is about to get shelved for another decade.

Edit: Is there any difference in the capturing aspect of the 9600 AIW vs the 9800 pro AIW?