I have some VHS tapes that I want to transfer to a computer hard drive.

[marada]

I have some VHS tapes that I want to transfer to a computer hard drive. My main concern is to preserve the quality of this captured footage and I am not worried about hard drive space since I already have 6 1TB drives. In light of this I wondered if the following method would work:

I thought about using a VCR player that can upscale VHS footage such as:

http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/22/jvcs-dr-mv7s-vcr-dvd-combo-recorder-promises-to-upscale-vhs

I would then connect this via a HDMI cable and feed this into a HDMI capture card such as the Blackmagic Intensity as discussed here:

http://www.videomaker.com/article/13256/

The benefit of this is that I would not have to compress the video in any way. Would this method yield better results than say using a Canopus ADVC-110?
I may burn the footage to blu ray at a later date; however my main concern is to get the VHS footage onto a hard drive in the best possible quality regardless of hard disc space occupied. The problem is most of the capture cards I have looked at seem to compress the footage in some way, so using the HDMI card I would not have to do this.

Do you think I would achieve good results using the method I propose, or am I on the wrong track?

Thanks Adam

[lordsmurf]

Stupid idea, yes.

Buy a better VCR. While that one might upscale, it will just upscale a mediocre signal. Combo VCRs (unless found on $700+ units) are generally crap.

The Blackmagic card squashes the Canopus card.

Upscaling VHS is silly. What would NOT be silly, however, is H.264 encoding at really good bitrates, on Blu-ray media. Stick to 720x480 max. And 720x480 is already upscaled, you realize.

[jman98]

lordsmurf is quite right and upscaling VHS tapes to HD resolutions is a bad idea for the reasons he mentioned. I might also point out that DVD/VHS combo units have a nasty problem in that sometimes they won't record your homemade tapes. Hollywood has convinced all the manufacturers to make these devices err on the side of not copying if they aren't sure about whether or not your tape is a commercial tape, so what happens is that the DVD recorder may refuse to record some of your personal tapes because for some crazy reason it thinks it is copying commercial tapes. A good quality VHS only unit is your best choice. However, since you're in the UK, I'd say that lordsmurf probably meant to suggest that you record at 720x576 (PAL) instead of 720x480 (NTSC).

[danno78]

Is this a stupid idea?

Yes.

Digitizing VHS tapes optimal means 4 items:
correction of time base errors
reduce noise from the image
convert the analog signal to digital signal
compression quality
This combo is for NTSC standard so only NTSC tape ca be converted, it is not clear if he has TBC, no real support for Super-VHS tape (SQPB is garbage),
A JVC vcr with DigiPure will remove time base errors and noise. A good capture card will transform analog signal in to digital form and a for the last stage two pass compression will store the content.
My hint is to think about fix first two items. DV compression made by Canopus is light.

[marada]

Thanks for all your replies. So what would you suggest I do? As I said most of the capture cards use some sort of compression. I don’t see why I just can’t capture the footage without compression? As I said I have over 6TB of storage so that is not an issue. I certainly don’t want to compress as MPEG2 etc. I may want to edit the footage in the future, but my main priority now is just capturing at the highest quality possible regardless of disc space. That is why I like the black magic card as you can capture without compression. I have an over clocked core 2 duo clocked at 4.3ghz so my specs are not a problem. Is there another VCR I could buy that would output via HDMI to this card?

[danno78]

With ATI Theatre 650 (12 bit ADC) +VirtualDub and lossless codec (Lagarith or Huffyuv) you can have the best digital form of your tape (30-40 Gb/hour). But you still need to have very good player. With cheap regular VHS players the quality will be low even if you have the best ADC in the world and lossless compression.

[jagabo]

As has been pointed out, upscaled crap is still crap. Just bigger.

Quality capture of VHS tapes starts with getting the analog signal off the tape. That means a high quality s-vhs deck with a line time base corrector and maybe noise reduction. (Note these are not made anymore, you'll be buying a used one via ebay or whatever.) Then you need a good analog processing amp to adjust colors and contrast before conversion to digital. A little sharpening might be in order too. Follow that with a full frame time base corrector to provide a clean, continuous analog signal even during tape drop outs. Finally conversion of the analog signal to digital form with YUV 4:2:2 encoding (usually YUY2). So you're looking at spending about US$1000, even buying used equipment.

After doing this what you have is as close to the contents of the VHS tape as possible. There is no point in upscaling this. Upscaling is simply the process of taking a digital image and making it larger while trying to keep sharp edges and not introducing artifacts. It does not introduce or restore detail that isn't in the source. Any upscaling you perform now may likely be outdated by future techniques. So all you would be doing is locking in all the artifacts introduced by todays upscaling algorithms. It's better to let your TV do the upscaling during playback. It may not be as good as the best (and very slow) software techniques available now (like The Deemon's* super resolution method). But in the future TV upscaling may improve and give better results than current software.

720x576, 25 fps, uncompressed YUV 4:2:2 video is about 75 GB/hr. Lossless compression with HuffYUV would reduce that to about 30 GB/hr. Lossless Lagarith to about 20 GB/hr.

Many of the cheap (<US$30) PCI cards support uncompressed and losslessly compressed YUY2 capture of standard definition video. The trick is finding one that's well designed so that it's not susceptible to noise from other devices inside the computer. Of course, the Blackmagic Intensity Pro can capture SD video but it may be overkill for that.

NTSC DV isn't so bad for VHS capture. It is very lightly compressed (few compression artifacts) and the 4:1:1 chroma subsampling isn't an issue for the low color resolution of VHS. The interlaced 4:2:0 subsampling of PAL DV might be an issue if you need to perform extensive filtering in software. On the other hand, since your final output is likely to be YUV 4:2:0 MPEG 2 for DVD there won't be much difference in the end.

* Beware of The Demon's examples at his web site. At fist he disingenuously compares the poorest upscaling technique (point resize) to his super resolution method. And he cherry picks a shot where super resolution works well. Dig further down where he compares to other, more sophisticated, resizing algorithms. The shots are still cherry picked though.

[marada]

So would the ATI Theatre 650 card really be my best option, would there be an noticeable difference in quality between this and say the Blackmagic card?

Also what would people recommend for a good second hand VCR player for this? I notice a few VCR were made with firewire ports. This could be useful for transferring digital video back to tape and vice versa. Were these machines any good? You may want to ask why I would want to put footage back to VHS tape, however I have some very stubborn elderly members of my family who refuse to use any other technology!

[JohnnyMalaria]

Bear in mind that if you print back to VHS tape later on then it will still incur one generational loss just as if you dubbed deck-to-deck.

Re your original question, do not use any format that uses interframe compression. Preserve interlacing and, if possible, 4:2:2 sampling.

[jagabo]

what would people recommend for a good second hand VCR player for this?

https://forum.videohelp.com/topic347374.html
https://forum.videohelp.com/topic291582.html

[marada]

Thanks a lot for the forum links. I have read through these posts; however the problem is many of these video cassette players were not released in the UK. In addition it seems there is very limited availability of these on Ebay etc (I have just been looking) I would really appreciate some suggestions on what suitable easily available Uk models.

Just out of interest what sort of quality were people getting when using those video cassette players with built in firewire ports? Were these any good or was the firewire a bit of a gimmick?

[lordsmurf]

UK is a small place, relatively speaking. The machines are made elsewhere in Europe for Europe-wide consumption (Australia, too). You're just not looking in enough places.

There is more discussion, in various threads, about PAL S-VHS machines here:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/forumdisplay.php/dvd-project-help-9.html
Panasonic, JVC -- and clones from Blaupunkt, among others.
There are plenty of machines to be had. I own a JVC HR-S7965EK PAL unit, made in Germany, and imported from UK (at a steep price, too!)

Firewire on a VCR is a gimmick. Very often, you need to read the fine print on all the things it CANNOT do.

[danno78]

So would the ATI Theatre 650 card really be my best option, would there be an noticeable difference in quality between this and say the Blackmagic card?

Ati card is verry good card for SD. Search the net for reviews. Which is better? I don`t know. Buy both and see. Don`t forget to share us the results.

Later edit:
Search SVHS vcr on ebay.de
http://video.shop.ebay.de/S-VHS-Recorder-/66206/i.html?_npmv=3

[redwudz]

marada, in the future please use a more descriptive subject title in your posts to allow others to search for similar topics. I will change yours this time. From our rules:

Try to choose a subject that describes your topic.
Please do not use topic subjects like Help me!!! or Problems.

Thanks,
Moderator redwudz

[marada]

I have to say The Deemon SuperResolution looks very good on the face of it, but thanks for the info on this. Everything does not always appear as it seems!

[lordsmurf]

I find Deemon to be so unstable that it's unusable.