Digital Master from VHS tapes

[Robin45]

Hi all,

I have just started the journey of converting VHS tapes to digital. I understand the limits of how good these tapes are going to look when converted, but I would still like to get the best results possible, so I thought I would start with trying to capture an uncompressed file. I have not yet purchased capture cards or software, but I do have two VCRs (JVC VP58U and Sharp VC-H996). I realize that neither of these are S-VHS, but they are almost brand new (I have owned them for their entire life) and the tapes play in them without any jumpiness, and except for a few tapes that are 40 years old, without noise.

I would love recommendations for the best setup for a lossless capture (e.g. ProRes since I am a mac user). My plan is to throw the files in Adobe Premiere and edit/put clips together. I am not concerned about file size being too big since I have 2.5 TB of space.

I would appreciate any insights you all have.

Thanks,
Robin

[dubster]

I recommend doing a search, as there's a lot of existing threads on capture setups, including the use of DVD recorders for line TBC stabilization, as well as comparisons of capture devices.

Just FYI - ProRes isn't actually lossless. It's just "perceptually lossless", meaning it's hard to spot the visual differences from the original signal. If you want true lossless, I recommend capturing with FFV1, which provides a fully lossless workflow, and is even recommended (along with FLAC for audio) by museums and other archival institutes.

[aramkolt]

Agree that ProRes isn't technically lossless, but visually lossless for most SD/Tape VHS type content. I suspect where you could notice more of a difference would be high motion scenes.

It's also a little apples to oranges because lossless 8 bit captures (that's what people are usually referring to when they talk about Huffyuv/Virtualdub captures) could have banding and lower dynamic range whereas a ProRes422/HQ (inherently 10 bit) capture might not have banding in low contrast transitions and appear superior to a lossless 8 bit capture under the right circumstances/scenes.

Banding tends to occur in 8 or less bit captures when there's a very slow color transition or most of the scene is a very similar color. Think of a sunset or blue sky. Most of the sky will get rounded to the same color value if there aren't enough colors to choose from. In reality. The sky truly is mostly the same color, but actually encoding it that way makes it look plastic-y or possibly blocky by the time you then go to compress it into something that might go up on YouTube. Having some more variance adds some "grain" and makes film appear sharper and less plastic/synthetic like.

Dubster is probably referring to 10 bit FFV1 though which wouldn't suffer from banding issues in low contrast/sky/mostly darkness scenes as it is also 10 bit, like ProRes. FFV1 isn't particularly user friendly to directly capture into though is my understanding unless you have a very fast computer, and most people that utilize FFV1 will capture in a different lossless format first, and then transcode to FFV1 after the capture which adds steps, time, hard drive requirements, but makes for very nice for the archival copy. I'm not super sure how well FFV1 plays with most editing programs whereas ProRes is broadly supported in everything for Mac and Windows.

There is such a thing as uncompressed MOV captures in 10 and 8 bit variants that some Blackmagic and AJA products can do, but they take up a ton of hard drive space. Something like that you could capture and then transcode to FFV1 potentially

[ozymango]

I would love recommendations for the best setup for a lossless capture (e.g. ProRes since I am a mac user).

Hi, Robin. I've done lots of video capturing on PCs running Windows (or Linux), but never on a Mac -- but as far as I know, the only way to capture lossless (or close enough) on a Mac would be to use DV/Firewire, like a DV camcorder or Canopus device for input, or the BlackMagic Intensity Shuttle, using a Thunderbolt input. Both methods have some possible drawbacks, particularly the Shuttle, because while it can produce amazing results, also it can be really finicky when it comes to input, if you don't have a TBC or at least a VCR with a built-in TBC, the BM Shuttle may not even recognize your analog input. There are plenty of USB capture devices that'll work with Macs, but as for lossless, I dunno -- I think a few will capture YUY2 at 640/480, maybe, but some might do MJPEG, some kind of compression, anyway.

Not very helpful, am I? Well I'm curious myself if there are semi-affordable lossless capture options for Macs, outside of using a DV pass-through device (which people either really love or really hate ), and I've not had much luck with BlackMagic devices myself, at least in the PC world, I can't afford them and when I can, they don't work. Well here's hoping somebody who love and uses Macs can help you!

[lordsmurf]

I understand the limits of how good these tapes are going to look when converted,

Most people make this wrong assumption. VHS tapes are not bad, methods to convert are bad. So lousy VCR, lack of TBC(s), problem capture card -- that's what reduces quality. VHS can be preserved quite well, with proper gear.

so I thought I would start with trying to capture an uncompressed file.

This is actually worse than lossless/codecs, because uncompressed has lots of overhead that can induce dropped frames. And regardless of how "fast" you think the computer is (as most capture processes are contained to one core or thread, and it bottlenecks).

but they are almost brand new (I have owned them for their entire life) and the tapes play in them without any jumpiness, and except for a few tapes that are 40 years old, without noise.

None of that matters. It's a low-end deck, period, and quality of output will be severely reduced. So "but I would still like to get the best results possible" really will not happen. Also, the key piece missing is TBCs, even if a minimalist ES10/15 type recorder on passthrough.

I would love recommendations for the best setup for a lossless capture (e.g. ProRes since I am a mac user).

Mac is a problem. That OS was always anti-video(capture), and few options exist, none of them great. You'll probably suffer usability issues with Blackmagic, and you'll suffer some quality issues with Canopus DV boxes. But those are generally your only path forward on a Mac. More ideal is to just add a Windows machine, even if a Win7 laptop. Capture there, and leave the Mac for the video editing.

FFV1 isn't particularly user friendly to directly capture into though is my understanding unless you have a very fast computer, and most people that utilize FFV1 will capture in a different lossless format first, and then transcode to FFV1 after the capture which adds steps, time, hard drive requirements, but makes for very nice for the archival copy. I'm not super sure how well FFV1 plays with most editing programs whereas ProRes is broadly supported in everything for Mac and Windows.

Correct, it's a problem format for capture. It's even a problem format for interlaced SD video, having been designed for HD. It's not any more archival that anything else lossless. NLE support largely sucks, generally requiring "codec packs" that further risks messing up a system.

FFV1 never should have been suggested by certain "archive" bodies. Somebody was doing some sort of behind-the-scenes lobbying for it, and major video/NLE companies have called BS on it by not including it natively to their software. Storing those codecs in MKV wrappers is even worse, which some archives now do. They'll all regret this in coming decades.

[dubster]

FFV1 isn't particularly user friendly to directly capture into though is my understanding unless you have a very fast computer, and most people that utilize FFV1 will capture in a different lossless format first, and then transcode to FFV1 after the capture which adds steps, time, hard drive requirements, but makes for very nice for the archival copy. I'm not super sure how well FFV1 plays with most editing programs whereas ProRes is broadly supported in everything for Mac and Windows.

Correct, it's a problem format for capture. It's even a problem format for interlaced SD video, having been designed for HD. It's not any more archival that anything else lossless. NLE support largely sucks, generally requiring "codec packs" that further risks messing up a system.

FFV1 never should have been suggested by certain "archive" bodies. Somebody was doing some sort of behind-the-scenes lobbying for it, and major video/NLE companies have called BS on it by not including it natively to their software. Storing those codecs in MKV wrappers is even worse, which some archives now do. They'll all regret this in coming decades.

Let me approach this in good faith - I'm not sure where the "very fast computer" narrative is coming from when capturing. VirtualDub2 supports FFV1 just fine, and encoding speed goes up when you increase the number of slices used (given a notable increase in filesize due to the loss in efficiency as slices are increased). I capture with ffmpeg to FFV1, and I can capture realtime to FFV1 using a total of about ~3% CPU. The latest versions of ffmpeg even support hardware encoding with FFV1 using Vulkan, although I've seen some reports that implementation could still use some work.

I can't disagree with the fact that other codecs like ProRes have greater support in common NLE's. However, it should be noted that pretty much all open source NLE's like Kdenlive, OpenShot, Flowblade, Shotcut and more can work just fine with FFV1. Moreover, Davinci Resolve (even the free version) supports FFV1 going as far back as version 18.

Yes, other NLE's may require a plugin to work with FFV1, although we're we'll past the days of the "Core Codec Pack" era.

It's even a problem format for interlaced SD video, having been designed for HD.

What's your source on this? Myself and several archival institutions use it for interlaced SD without problems. Here's the spec for FFV1 - it does not mention interlacing nor even resolution in said spec: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9043/

FFV1 is completely agnostic to whether a source is interlaced or progressive. And that's a good thing.

FFV1 never should have been suggested by certain "archive" bodies. Somebody was doing some sort of behind-the-scenes lobbying for it, and major video/NLE companies have called BS on it by not including it natively to their software. Storing those codecs in MKV wrappers is even worse, which some archives now do. They'll all regret this in coming decades.

What's your source? The archival bodies seem to be pretty clear on why they prefer to use a completely open source format (which includes FFV1, FLAC, and MKV) for long term archival purposes. This public stance seems pretty far from "behind-the-scenes".

[dubster]

Dubster is probably referring to 10 bit FFV1 though which wouldn't suffer from banding issues in low contrast/sky/mostly darkness scenes as it is also 10 bit, like ProRes. FFV1 isn't particularly user friendly to directly capture into though is my understanding unless you have a very fast computer, and most people that utilize FFV1 will capture in a different lossless format first, and then transcode to FFV1 after the capture which adds steps, time, hard drive requirements, but makes for very nice for the archival copy. I'm not super sure how well FFV1 plays with most editing programs whereas ProRes is broadly supported in everything for Mac and Windows.

I was originally referring to 8-bit capture, but 10-bit is great if you can do it. However, I'm not sure how much extra value 10-bit is offering if someone is using an external TBC-like device in their signal path. For example, using a DVD recorder (like the DMR-ES10) will convert the signal from analog to digital internally. I could be wrong, but considering that DVD recorders were designed to write to DVD's, I expect that that analog to digital conversion is limited to 8-bit. So even if you used a 10-bit capture device, fed from the signal from your DVD recorder, you'd be doing a 10-bit capture of an 8-bit signal, which pretty much defeats the purpose IMHO.

It'd only make sense in my mind to do a 10-bit capture if you knew for sure that your TBC-like device was doing >8-bit processing. The only way I know of doing this today is using something like the RetroTink 4k, which does TBC and analog to digital conversion in one step, which you can then send to a high-bit depth HDMI capture card like a BlackMagic DeckLink Quad HDMI.