Weird Flicker with TBC ON on Sony Handycam TRV118

[Wallabee19]

Hello all,

I'm digitizing all my families old Video8 tapes using my Dad's Sony Handycam TRV118 he still has. All the ~30 tapes are Video8, except for one Hi8 tape. I have a Hauppauge USB Live 2 (S-Video) and using AmaRecTV for capturing. (NTSC 720x480 @ 29.97 and 4:2:2)

I started capturing a week ago and noticed there was a strange flicker in the captures that I initially just attributed to the tapes being old. Most of the tapes were recorded between 1994-2000. When I started doing post-processing using AviSynth and doing test encodes, the flicker really started to bother me, and none of the Deflicker filters did a good job from my minor testing and just ended up introducing more ghosting than anything.

Before I captured, I did glance at what that TBC setting was, and seen most suggest to leave it enabled, so I left it that way. However, curiosity got the best of me and I did another test capture with TBC turned OFF on the camera and poof the flicker is almost all gone.

So now I'm a bit distraught that I'm probably going to have to recapture all of these 30 tapes again, but on the bright side most of the flicker can probably be eliminated now.

I'm just curious what would cause this flicker to happen when the TBC is On? Also, what kind of issues can I expect by leaving it off? I know best way is to get a good external TBC, but I'm not looking for perfect captures. So long as leaving TBC Off isn't going to really mess something up along the way. I'm currently doing a full capture on one of the tapes with TBC off and in the preview window of AmaRecTV, everything looks good so far and I haven't noticed anything weird.

I've attached two short clips showcasing the flicker when TBC is on, and how it mostly disappears when it's off. These short clips were just quickly ran through ffmpeg with a quick bwdif deinterlace and x264 encode, just to showcase the issue which is easy to see, especially on the bottom left of the video.

Anyone else experience this issue with these Sony Handycams?

[dellsam34]

It's almost like a line jitter by looking at the hard coded date, But it is only noticeable at the bottom section of the frame, Never seen this artifact before, I would try another camcorder and go from there otherwise you just have to live with it. I don't see any effects on the video the TBC being ON or OFF which leads me to believe the TBC section is defective due to possible drifted capacitors values.

[Wallabee19]

Interesting! I didn't even notice the jittery date until you pointed it out. That also seems to stabilize with TBC Off.

Unfortunately I don't have another camcorder to test with, but will probably just continue to recapture everything with TBC Off, and then compare them to my current captures with TBC On.

Could the circuitry in the camcorder for the TBC just be going bad? Bad capacitor or something?

[dellsam34]

In the late 80's to early 90's Sony used a bad batch of SMD capacitors, Your camcorder looks like from a later era, late 90's to early 2000's so highly unlikely a victim of that, but that doesn't mean it is immune to component failure, Bad storage condition such as extreme heat, extreme cold, moisture can contribute to the rapid aging of electronic components such as capacitors and microchips.

[Wallabee19]

The tapes and camcorder would have been stored indoors in a temperature controlled environment for the last 20-30 years. All the tapes seem to be in really good condition from what I can tell. Funny enough the older tapes (mid 90s) seem to be slightly higher quality/sharper than some of the newer stuff that was shot between 2000-2005. Better tape quality back in the day?

I've just finished my first full 2 hour capture with TBC Off and everything looks great. Doing frame to frame comparison between the two and it seems TBC Off is even a tiny bit sharper. But that may be because I also turned off DNR on the camera this time around as well, in case that circuitry is also going bad. I can do DNR in post.

But the big thing is no more annoying flickering. Just hope the rest of the tapes capture this good with TBC Off now.