Irregular frames in Video Capture

[Gavilan]

I have a problem, i have quite a few old tapes, i.e. over 10 years old. they where taped on an old Panasonic Mono VCR, i want to copy these to DivX files and store them on CD. I have the capture card working, but on some of my tapes, i get a problem where the frames seem to shift. That is if a person is at one position in the frame and then moves to another position, the frames will switch rapidly between the two positions over a number of frames.

As you can imagine, this is very irritating, could i have a problem with low signal strength?, i have a video enhancer attached between the vcr and the card but this makes no difference.It happens on half of my tapes. I also have 6 -7 Young ones episodes, 3 taped OK the other 3 have the frame shifting problem. Could it be a problem with the frame rate? The tapes are PAL and i am capturing at 25 fps.

Thanks.

[resnullius]

have you checked what your actual output frame rate is? if i undertand your question that might be the problem... Have you made sure you turned of all unnecessary software before caputring (check by doing ctrl alt del)

[Gavilan]

I have not checked the frame rate comming from the video? Is there a utility to do this. I am assuming that when the video degrades, the frame rate from the video may reduce?

[Dragonsf]

maybe the A/D converter get's out of sync.The capture will see only the last good frame overlayed with parts of the actual frame.

[Triffid]

I get something similar (I think) when I record of old tapes. There are two problems actually - 1. a frame will get left shifted about 20%, and 2. There is a burst of multi-colour' in a frame. It happens infrequently, and there are generally not 'bunches' of errors together.

I have put it down to deteriation of the video signal (as I got a lot of it after I left one of my very precious tapes next to my monitor for a few days - and many degausses - and it now exhibits a LOT of these problems.)

It would be really good if someone has a solution though (for the more genearl case).

For now, I have been masking the offending frames (where there are only a few spread thourhg out a video) in virtualdub, which it quite unnoticable in the finished product.

[Dragonsf]

I'm using the Hollywood Bridge for capturing.I'm told by Dazzle, that you can't do anything about bad frames.I wrote a small program fro detecting bad frames( through the audio part: always no audio or distortred audio) and cutting (through ULEAD video editor).
The older the tape, the more errors you get.