What do you think of this workflow for capturing commercial VHS?

[orsetto]

jjeff, my SL5800 was stolen before MV replaced the old CopyGuard system, so I was never able to test it as a MV passthru filter. Both the SL5100 hifi I later owned, and the SL-HF360 I still use for the occasional Beta transfer, proved ineffective as MV passthru filters. IIRC, Sony eventually caved to studio pressure to make Beta responsive to MV, but I don't remember the exact year.

Experimentation, variability and intensity of MV corruption peaked around 1988: multiple commercial titles released in this era are so badly distorted by MV that they play poorly straight from VCR to TV, and even a full-fledged TBC can't perfectly restore them during capture. I keep a handful of such tapes to use as torture tests when I acquire a new vcr, TBC or filter. Fortunately most of these are considered ordinary common back-catalog titles today, easily accessed on streaming services or available as cheap, remastered DVDs or BDs.

A very small percentage of these titles are exceedingly rare: curiosities at the time, virtually forgotten now, the only version available being their thirty y/o VHS incarnation. Those released by second-tier companies can be afflicted by a double-whammy: the peak, worst version of MV being sloppily applied during duplication to the point the resulting tapes are an abomination altogether. Coincident with this thread, a friend asked to borrow my DVD transfer of such a title last night. I hadn't screened it in a few years, and was amused to see all the notes I scrawled on it regarding the transfer difficulties. It required a Panasonic AG1980 DNR circuit with internal vcr TBC defeated, DataVideo TBC1000 in tandem with a shoebox-sized circa-1987 programmable MV filter unit (that had cost me $300 back then and amazingly still works), patched thru a Pioneer DVD recorder, to finally eliminate the intense flicker, tearing and other MV-induced garbage.

Even with all that correction, you can still see ghostly remnants of MV flashing at the top in some scenes (and that ancient brute-force filter box skews colors to sepia, which is why I prefer the newer cleaner weaker 9v boxes whenever possible). I did this transfer in 2009 and hope never to do another like it again: on a whim, I just Googled the film and found it had made its way thru multiple license holders to land in the Warner Archive burn-on-demand service, where its been available on DVD since 2015. Disappointed reviewers say it is literally a VHS transfer, same quality as the transfer I did myself, so I don't think I'll bother replacing mine.

Getting back on topic for robertzombie: by roughly 1990, MV quietly began backing down from its frequent escalations of the late '80s, after too many complaints from video stores and consumers that the tapes were barely playable legally. MV intensity and techniques became more uniform and a bit less intrusive, more easily and cleanly corrected for transfer today by TBCs and filters. Most rarities you collect dating from 1990 or later should be relatively simple to handle, esp obscure concerts and TV specials which tended to have milder or no MV at all. Only a tiny fraction of truly obscure titles released by smaller companies in the late '80s had the ghastly botched version of MV that I dealt with a few times: you are unlikely to encounter this. You should be OK with a simple black box 9v filter (and/or a good PAL-market TBC like the TVone / CBT100 if you can find/afford one).

[lingyi]

All Sony Beta VCRs (I owned numerous models from the SL-5800 to the EDV-7500) ignored most forms of Macrovision because of the variable AGC in their design:

"The age of a vcr does not effect it's reaction to macrovision. Macrovision worked by varying the AGC circuit of the VCR and since VHS VCR's use a fixed AGC they were effected by macrovision. There were a very few VHS decks that used a variable AGC,mainly very early VHS with special effects. Oddly all beta vcr's ignored macrovision because they used a variable AGC. They recorded the macrovision signal,they just ignored it,itwas on the beta copy and if you tried to copy the beta tape to VHS,macrovision would rear it's ugly head. I used a Sima SCC to make VHS backups,back in the day."

https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/166928-How-Do-I-Defeat-Macrovision

I read that some non-Sony Beta machines did fall to Macrovision.

I used to get a chuckle [because] you could look at the Vertical Blanking Interval (VBI) by using the vertical hold on a CRT and see the Macrovision signal on a dubbed Beta tape.

Thinking about it, those VHS tapes that I had issues with may not have had Macrovision, but CopyGuard, which required a different black box.

[orsetto]

Thinking about it, those VHS tapes that I had issues with may not have had Macrovision, but CopyGuard, which required a different black box.

Yes, the initial CopyGuard was an equal-opportunity problem for both Beta and VHS. If anything, it was more of a problem for Beta because that was the era when Beta was still popular enough to have multiple vendors that weren't all simply re-badged Sony units. The early non-Sony Beta VCRs, esp the crappy but cheap Sanyo models, were worse at playing CopyGuard tapes than Sony designs (often because they employed subtle modifications of the complex expensive loading path).

MV largely bypassed Sony due to the AGS difference, as you note, but this didn't always extend to using them as passthru filters between two other VCRs: if the destination VCR was VHS, it was usually no go. Not that many people were in a position to try the experiment: you'd have to have been wealthy and a little nuts to own a Betamax plus a VHS plus another VCR of either format. There was one older Sony model I briefly owned or borrowed that seemed to have passthru ability, but when I purchased a later (1989?) SL-330 it didn't work: it ignored MV for its own recordings per usual but did not filter it thru its line jacks. Ditto the overhauled 1987 SL-HF360 that still remains on my rack. In any case, even if the Betamax passthru still worked for VHS it would probably not work as a filter for digital transfer, because it doesn't truly mask the MV like a proper filter: the encoding device would likely still be able to "see" the MV, triggering a lockout.

Interestingly, there was actually one obscure Panasonic VHS (PV-4962) that became famous for not reacting to MV, but it was blink and you missed it, and today difficult to find because Panasonic recycled the model number three times over afterward for unrelated economy models. Like the Betamax folklore, probably not applicable to digital transfer: same issue with a sensitive encoding device still being able to "see" the MV because it isn't truly filtered out by the PV-4962.

[lingyi]

LOL. I definitely wasn't (still not [and far far from being]) wealthy, but was definitely more than a little nuts as I had 20+ Betamax machines (with 6-8 of them in use at one time) + 2 VHS machines at one point.

As you stated, it doesn't make sense (never tried it myself) that a Betamax (which are exclusively Sonys, all other machines are Beta (format)) would somehow act as a passthrough seeing as how the Macrovision signal was still there on my Beta recordings. On some recordings with the black box I owned, the Macrovision signal was just lessened, exhibiting a slower light to dark transition (as seen in the VBI) which was usually barely noticeable on the dub. When run through my TBC-1000 however, the VBI was clean, with no Macrovision "boxes" at all.

I'm interested in seeing a snippet of the VBI on a tape or capture that been through the "bypass" on a Betamax to see if the Macrovision signal is still there.

Note that all my copying was from VHS to Beta only and my beloved Betamax machines sat unused by the early 2000's when I moved to DVDs.

[orsetto]

LOL. I definitely wasn't (still not [and far far from being]) wealthy, but was definitely more than a little nuts as I had 20+ Betamax machines (with 6-8 of them in use at one time) + 2 VHS machines at one point.

You win the prize for having the most toys at once!

I got a little mixed up on the different VCR eras. In CopyGuard days, you did need to be fairly well off to own multiple VCRs: the average midrange VHS was still $699 and a middling Sony Beta $799 (beaucoup bucks in 1982). By the time MV was in full swing, prices had dropped nearly 50%, so "enthusiasts" like us could find ways to afford multiple decks (though it was still uncommon to own more than two, and the max I ever owned simultaneously was four). I caught up later when DVD/HDD recorders bottomed out: snatched up every Canadian Pioneer that popped up on eBay for $200 in that sweet period between retailers not being able to give them away and people panic buying when they discovered they were discontinued forever.

I'm interested in seeing a snippet of the VBI on a tape or capture that been through the "bypass" on a Betamax to see if the Macrovision signal is still there.

I'm pretty sure the result was the same as a Beta>Beta dub: the VHS>VHS made via Beta passthru "cleaning" would have the MV squares intact on the VBI, and any attempt to dupe that dupe would fail in the normal way.

[jjeff]

LOL. I definitely wasn't (still not [and far far from being]) wealthy, but was definitely more than a little nuts as I had 20+ Betamax machines (with 6-8 of them in use at one time) + 2 VHS machines at one point.

As you stated, it doesn't make sense (never tried it myself) that a Betamax (which are exclusively Sonys, all other machines are Beta (format)) would somehow act as a passthrough seeing as how the Macrovision signal was still there on my Beta recordings. On some recordings with the black box I owned, the Macrovision signal was just lessened, exhibiting a slower light to dark transition (as seen in the VBI) which was usually barely noticeable on the dub. When run through my TBC-1000 however, the VBI was clean, with no Macrovision "boxes" at all.

I'm interested in seeing a snippet of the VBI on a tape or capture that been through the "bypass" on a Betamax to see if the Macrovision signal is still there.

Note that all my copying was from VHS to Beta only and my beloved Betamax machines sat unused by the early 2000's when I moved to DVDs.

My first VCR was a new RCA-VFT650 back in '82, my second was a Sanyo made Betamax in '83 as it was <$400, the cheapest VHS decks back then was almost double that. A year or so later I snagged an open box Magnavox, clone to my VFT-650 for <$500 so then I could make VHS to VHS copies. A year or so later I picked up my first dream deck, what I was going to get before someone talked me into the RCA, a Sony SL-5800, it was used at the Sony Sound Center for I believe $300. A few years after that I picked up a couple more clones to my RCA as well as several JVCs(piano key style) another SL-5800 and SL-5600 and SL-5400. At one point I probably 8?? VCRs hooked up and could copy from any format to another. Still have many of them but none of the originals are hooked up, for VCRs all I have hooked up are several Panasonic combo VHS/DVDRs and a front load Samsung that still is used several times/year, none of my Betamax's are hooked up.