Hi guys,
I need 30 S-VHS players to capture S-VHS tapes to HDD (Using Intensity Shuttle from BlackMagic Design).
I would probably be able to find 30 separate S-VHS players used on Ebay, but I'd love to check to see if there where any hopes of getting 30x of the same model, or maybe at least buy 30x from one seller.
I'd also like some inputs on what to look out for when buying used S-VHS players.
I don't need any fancy recorders. I'm going to capture the video from the S-VHS tapes to an HDD using the Intensity Shuttle unit mentioned above.
Kind regards,
Stian Berg Larsen
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High-end SVHS players are hard to come by (as if you didn't know by now : no longer made, but there might be some higher-grade studio units around for $$$$.
Used ones have been around the block a few times, and very limited parts support if at all. The last lower-end SVHS player I saw around was the JVC HR-S3600 and HR-S3900 series, about $200 back then. Auction sites and iffy sources like Craigs List are likely the only possibility nowadays.Last edited by sanlyn; 21st Mar 2014 at 07:14.
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Awww, oh well..
Let me know if anyone should come by someone/somewhere who sells a couple of them. No need for high-end, as long as it supports S-VHS. Mono would also be ok for sound I guess...
But thanks =) -
You're apparently located in Norway, which pretty much blows any possible chance you might have at just randomly finding a source of 30 SVHS decks that are PAL-compatible in good condition. You might as well ask if anyone in Oslo just happens to have 30 film-back Hasselblad H-1 cameras in mint condition.
You'll need to check local "for sale" sites (and eBay sites of nearby countries) for moderately-priced used PAL-compatible SVHS decks that have a reputation for ruggedness that survives shipping and handling. I'd recommend the Mitsubishi (MGA) HS-U748 and similar: these were made until 2001 and are built like tanks but are not overpriced overhyped "high end" units. Any of the normal-sized (42 cm wide approx) Panasonics, such as PV-S9670, circa mid to late 1990s should be equally good- but I'd avoid any of the final "compact" models sold from 1998 onward. JVC is not a good risk for a large number of VCRs: they can be high quality but tend to be the least reliable of the SVHS group (buying a single JVC is perhaps a worthwhile risk for a personal project, buying 30 for a massive project would subject you to high risk of expensive repairs). Model numbers may vary in Scandinavia.Last edited by orsetto; 19th Sep 2011 at 12:51.
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It sounds like quality doesn't matter then. I guess you're just doing some cheap low-quality work. I feel sorry for the client, if this isn't for personal needs. (And I would doubt it is.)
It will take time and effort to simply find one good S-VHS VCR, much less 30 of them. The low-end machines were made cheaply and broke easily. So those were mostly thrown in the trash, not resold. There was no benefit to getting them repaired, or to extend their life beyond 5-10 years.
Video captured from a cheap VCR looks like crap.
But quality doesn't seem to matter.
So it's actually more like asking for 30 mint Polaroid cameras.Want my help? Ask here! (not via PM!)
FAQs: Best Blank Discs • Best TBCs • Best VCRs for capture • Restore VHS -
Sorry, I might not be clear enough. English is not my main language as you may know
What I ment with "not high-end" was that I didn't need any fancy overly expencive S-VHS players with a shit-load of functions. OF course I want good quality on the playback, but I don't need any functions.
We're capturing recordings of underwater tubes (in the oil&gas industry), captured using ROV's in the early 1990's.. Got about 15 000 tapes or more (not quite sure yet, as I'm only the hardware guy trying to get it all together).
Anyways, we've got a programmer who've made the software needed to do the converting, OCR and such, but we need some S-VHS players.
So let me first thank you orsetto for your helpful comment, and sorry to lordsmuft. I didn't mean to say I want crappy equipment. Just that I don't necessarily need any high-end functions (other than a good playback quality of course). =)
Hope that cleared it up. I'll look locally to see if I can find any used S-VHS players around here..
Thanks guys!
EDIT: Just to clarify, we DO focus on picture quality and good equipment, but as I'm no pro when it comes to S-VHS I Thought "no high-end" meant no extra functions needed. I only need good playback quality so the image is nice (sound will not be used for these).
We're also spending about 90 000$ on recording equipment (extra computers, servers and capturing cards) for this client, so we do focus on good equipment =)Last edited by Stianbø; 20th Sep 2011 at 02:05.
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Understood.
There have been a lot of lazy/cheap people here lately. As such, they just butcher video, make horrible quality DVDs/whatever. And to top it off, some of them are amateur hacks that are running conversion services, so they're not just screwing up their own videos, their screwing up somebody else's! So the knee-jerk reaction is to give them a written smack to the face. It's good to read that you're not one of them.
Refer to the VCR Buying Guide for suggested models.
But again, good luck finding 30 decks. eBay and lots of time is what you'll need.Last edited by lordsmurf; 20th Sep 2011 at 03:17. Reason: typos
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Thanks mate =)
Is it normal that many of the more popular models have PAL support too? Or ar most of the US models NTSC only?
I've read that thread before, but I'll have another look.
I'm not sure if looking for specific models will make my search easier, but I'll give it another go =) -
Looking for specific models will make your search easier.
VCRs are NTSC only or PAL only.
The few that do both are lousy quality, and you don't want them. (Not S-VHS, either.)Want my help? Ask here! (not via PM!)
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The VCR Buying Guide LordSmurf referred to is an excellent resource, but like many such dedicated threads it started out as concise and ended up rather complex and overwhelming for some novices to grasp. In the interest of summarizing for anyone who comes to this thread with a similar project in mind:
VCRs break down into 3 classes: low-end, mid-range and high-end. The SVHS variants are rarely low-end although there were a few in the waning years as mfrs had nothing to lose by offering cheaply-made SVHS models to compete with DVD. There is a much wider range of performance and build-quality variations in standard VHS units, to the point where discussion of them can branch out into many paths. SVHS by nature is held to a somewhat higher specification, so there is a bit less variance in basic performance. SVHS image is going to be pretty decent when played on almost any SVHS vcr: the biggest difference between "mid-range" SVHS and "high end" SVHS is the high end includes elaborate editing features along with the (IMHO) over-rated TBC/DNR circuitry.
The fancy tape editing features are utterly irrelevant today for playing tapes into digital capture, so theres no need to consider them- the TBC/DNR features are much more significant in such work. TBC means Time Base Corrector, DNR means Digital Noise Reduction. These circuits act as electronic filters, performing real-time cleanup and smoothing of color and detail noise. By using a VCR with these circuits, you can often avoid additional tedious cleanup in PC software, because the capture has already been optimized. At the beginning of the digital capture era, people went a little crazy, and an over-hyped cult developed around the few SVHS vcrs that have this TBC/DNR feature. It drove second-hand prices sky high, and now in 2011 you must understand the limited supply of these "high-end" units have all been heavily used, sold and resold between people who needed (or thought they needed) those features. Prices for such high-end VCRs have dropped dramatically from their peak in 2005/2006, but they are still very expensive and very few are in truly good condition anymore. You would almost certainly need to budget for tuneup/repairs on any high-end VCRs you find.
Its a good idea to hear several points of view on the practical value and necessity of the high-end VCRs vs low or midrange. LordSmurf does capture work and digital video projects every day, he is a formidable professional technician who takes time out from his busy schedule to offer the benefit of his long experience to VH members. I respect him immensely and have learned a great deal from him. You might say he takes the position at one extreme of the spectrum, in that he strongly feels digital capture is not worth doing at all unless you expend every possible effort to make it perfect. At the other extreme you have people who want to make the minimum possible effort: sometimes they are lazy, more often they lack the technical savvy, or interest, or honestly don't perceive a big difference in capture quality between various methods.
In the middle you have hobbyists like myself, who are capturing their personal tape collections, have a somewhat limited budget of money and time, and are not doing the work for other people- only ourselves. I have owned many of the recommended high-end SVHS VCRs that have TBC/DNR, and while I agree they can work wonders to improve the quality of captures they are not without disadvantages. As noted earlier, they are scarce, they tend to be very well used and worn out, they tend to require repair, and PAL versions are almost impossible to locate in any quantity in some countries: I think you would have a VERY difficult task finding 30 high-end SVHS with TBC/DNR in Norway, for example. But lets say you do find them: the issue then becomes whether they truly offer an improvement for your particular tapes to offset the higher hardware costs. The TBC/DNR filters do offer some significant improvement, particularly in large blocks of colors like red and in overall graininess as well as straightening of wavy verticals. Disadvantages include an "unnatural" appearance to textured objects and very noticeable temporal distortion: objects in motion often look like poorly executed CGI with some details lagging behind the larger movements. These drawbacks go unnoticed by many but are very annoying to some: I find them unacceptable enough to limit my use of TBC/DNR to tapes that absolutely need such help. You may find the TBC/DNR artifacts totally unacceptable in your specific case, since all the tapes you need to capture are official records of arcane underwater technical operations: any artificial smoothing or motion distortion would detract from the accuracy of the records.
Another issue is the very limited number of mechanism choices in the high-end models. 80% of SVHS vcrs equipped with TBC/DNR were made by JVC, many of them using the exact same tape mechanism. This mechanism has a tendency to drift out of alignment and be difficult to repair. Even when working perfectly, the tracking range can be limited for tapes that were not originally made on a JVC. (In North America and Asia, JVC did later release much-improved "DVHS" vcrs that had similar high-performance as SVHS but with better-designed mechanics- unfortunately these are scarce and I don't think you'd find PAL versions anywhere near Norway.) The only other mfr to offer SVHS vcrs in PAL with TBC/DNR were Panasonic: these are VERY popular in Europe. The Panasonics have more "forgiving" tracking performance that makes them better for playing slower speed (EP/SLP) tapes. The overall "look" of the Panasonic TBC/DNR is different from JVC: not better or worse, but different enough that many here with a large collection of tapes use both brands of VCR. Unfortunately Panasonic was not nearly as consistent with the specs of its TBC/DNR as JVC was: all JVCs with TBC/DNR will offer the same general improvements, but many versions of TBC/DNR were made by Panasonic and most were NOT comparable to the JVC performance. The consensus in Europe is that the Panasonic NV-FS200 was the only Panasonic to match or exceed the performance of JVC TBC/DNR, accordingly the NV-FS200 is one of the most sought-after VCRs in PAL countries for use in digital tape capture.
Normally I would agree with LordSmurf that if one can find and afford a high-end SVHS or DVHS vcr, it is well worth having for tapes that benefit from the TBC/DNR filters. But in your situation, perhaps not. All your tapes are of the same subject and the captures will be an official record of technical operations. You are not capturing personal family videos or Hollywood entertainment- you are capturing underwater technical recordings. I don't believe these would benefit from TBC/DNR processing- it might actually degrade the accuracy of the captures. Since your tapes are SVHS format, not ordinary regular VHS, they should have enough inherent signal quality to be captured "raw" without additional real-time processing. In fact the firm that contracted you may well need to do computer enhancement on select segments later on, which might be more successful if you do not pre-process for them with TBC/DNR.
I think you would be OK with any decent SVHS vcr in good condition, and you are more likely to find 30 "midrange" SVHS decks in good condition than 30 "high-end" models. Good luck in your project!Last edited by orsetto; 20th Sep 2011 at 12:05.
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Hahaha.... but your summary ended up longer than my post!
The master thread at digitalFAQ.com keeps receiving updates to better organize and explain everything in detail. I've done as much as possible to expand and explain everything for the novice in the preface, before listing out the confirmed VCRs. The mirrored version here at VH mostly receives model updates as they're confirmed; and that thread has been added to my other members here (mostly asking questions, sometimes adding suggestions that I do follow up on, whether I reply or not, as I'm subbed to the thread).
I'm an advocate for three basic things: good VCR ($200-400), external TBC ($225-450), good capture card ($50+)
That applies to everybody.
Now there is more advanced hardware that I suggest -- but that's for the more serious hobbyist or professional.Want my help? Ask here! (not via PM!)
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We're using the Intensity Shuttle from BlackMagic for capture. The test's we've done so far have been on a BlackMagic Studio Pro, but we won't need all the connections it offers. So we can downgrade to the Intensity Shuttle.
We tried several HDD setups, but the only one that was able to capture 10-bit DPX files with no dropped frames what so ever was 2 newer WD Caviar Black hdd's (1,5TB each) in a RAID 0 setup. This gives us about 270MB/s read/write, which is good enough. 120MB/s was not enough, and we did get some dropped frames.
As for workstations to do the processing after it's been captured we're using HP Z400 (as they are approved from BlackMagic to work with Intensity Shuttle, if we add a USB3.0 PCI Card.
For this first part of the project, we're using a setup of 12 machines and 12 recorders. Normal VHS this time..
The problem is when we're going over to phase 2, where we're upscaling to 30 machines and 30 S-VHS players..! =D -
Check eBay Germany. That's the place you'll find the most PAL S-VHS machines. For capturing, the different broadcast flavours of PAL used in various parts of Europe are irrelevant since you won't be using the tuners; what's on the tape, and what comes out of the AV sockets, is exactly the same for all EU PAL countries.
Uncompressed black magic intensity + RAID for VHS? Without a TBC anywhere?! Completely wrong priorities. You should use S-VHS machines with TBC built-in, even for VHS work.
Cheers,
David. -
I agree with 2Bdecided...Intensity Shuttle???? Any VHS/SVHS decks you are going to find WILL NOT have HDMI connections. They will have composite, probably S-video, very slightl possibility of analog component. But NO HDMI. Pointless.
And DPX 10bit???? Talk about overkill. Losslessly compressed 8bit YUV 4:2:2 from a direct S-video connection to Full D1 resolution is really about the best quality you'll be able to extract out of a VHS/SVHS tape. And that certainly doesn't require such exotic setups.
Scott -
VHS barely has 6 bits of signal under all the noise. By capturing 10 bits you're just getting more accurate noise.
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Thanks for your replies! =)
First of all, let me comment on the 10-bit DPX.. I know this is way overkill, but it seems to be the only format that produces an image sequence from black magic media express... Any other recommendations would be great =)
I'm just here to test our setup and find the equipment. I'm not the head of the project. And believe me, I've tried to give my point of view when it comes to the 10-bit DPX... But oh.. (1 tape of 3 hours takes up about 500GB)
We're running an OCR app on the captured frames, and cutting it into 15 minute sequences before it's encoded to MPEG-2.
So, any stable, good capturing software recommendations would be nice =)
As for the Intensity Shuttle: It's got HDMI, yes (which we will use for the VHS machines, since comparing the quality we could not see any differences between HDMI and composite
. But the Intensity Shuttle also have S-Video IN/OUT, Composite IN/OUT, YPBPR(component) IN/OUT. Should be good enough? Or am I mistaken? -
You (or someone!) is spending all this money to capture VHS without a TBC anywhere?
This is just silly.
The S-video input will be fine - but you need a TBC in the VCR for best results. You should also check that the levels are correct, and have the facility to adjust if necessary. Or at least set white and black level conservatively to avoid clipping.
Cheers,
David. -
I will have to look into this.. We've done a lot of tests now on normal VHS tapes, as this is the first part of the project. (actually, these are two separate projects, but I call them part 1 and 2).. The recorded data looked good enough, and the OCR worked..
I will take the TBC into consideration, and I'm glad you guys notify me of stuff like this...
Thanks -
A line TBC will definitely help with OCR. The horizontal jitter inherent in VHS recordings will distort the letters. I assumed this is why you were looking for SVHS decks (many of which include a line TBC). A full frame TBC may not help with OCR but will provide a stable picture in case of VHS dropouts or severe time base problems from stretched or damaged tapes.
I think the point about using the Intensity Shuttle was that it was very expensive for VHS capture. Many US$30 analog capture cards will work just as well for that. -
How long time will it take to run through 9 hours of captured video? (The line TBC part of it).. So far we're planing on using 12 machines for this first project. These will capture 3 tapes each (with 3 hours on each tape), which means we'll get 108 hours captured within 9 hours. Then we're using the rest of the day to process these files with OCR, encoding, and splitting the movies into 15 min clips. We're also writing a lot of information to another document from the OCR scans). This part of the process is taking about 8 hours per machine (per set of 3 tapes), so we don't have too many hours left over to do more processing.
The 10-bit DPX is an overkill indeed, but what other software do you recommend to use to capture to image sequence? Remember, we'd need up to 30 licenses totally, so it cant be an overly expensive software... -
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OCR, among other video aspects, may or may not be "improved" by a VCR with built-in Line TBC. The line TBC is a tool, an option to be used with discretion: it is not a set it and forget it cure-all. It might "improve" the text overlay while crapping all over the actual video, which is technical archive footage. A test run is advised here.
And everyone seems to have forgotten: Stianbø is located in Norway, not Los Angeles. The odds of him finding 6, 12, or 30 PAL-format SVHS vcrs with built-in line TBC are pretty small. If he does find them, they won't be cheap: Panasonic NV-FS200 and JVC HR-S7965EK were not bargain VCRs when new, and are highly coveted second hand. Since Norway has no apparent eBay affiliation, where exactly is Stianbø supposed to find these elusive VCRs, quickly and affordably and in working condition? I'm not being sarcastic- seriously, if he decides to take this route how would he obtain a quantity of such VCRs in Norway? If they prove too difficult to acquire, what is his next best option to emulate their functions?
Unless I missed something, and these SVHS were originally recorded on NTSC equipment. In that case, it should be fairly easy (but not inexpensive) to source several line-tbc VCRs like Panasonic AG-1980 and JVC SR-V101 in North America and have them shipped to Norway.Last edited by orsetto; 28th Sep 2011 at 16:43.
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We're first running through some thousand VHS tapes before we'll start on the SVHS project.. So I do have some time, but not too much =)
I'll have to look at other european ebay sites, and also qxl.no and finn.no (norwegian auction sites).
I really appreciate all the help I get here!!! =D You guys are amazing
Could anyone give me a quick software recommendation too (I have to capture to an image sequence, but no need for 10-bit DPX =P )?
As far as I know all of the tapes are PAL. =/ So this will be interesting.. I might have to contact our tv companies to ask if they have something around :P Might be lucky..! -
Wait.
Stop.
Back up a second here. Too many acronyms.
OCR = ???Want my help? Ask here! (not via PM!)
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OCR = Optical Character Recognition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition)
Which basically means using a software to scan each image looking for text. We need to store information about where the ROV's are at each frame, so that searching will be easier (all this information is written on-screen, so we need an OCR to read all of this and store it in a separate file). We've already made this software, and it works great =) -
Given what a line TBC does, it's hard to imagine how it could do what you say. Some TBCs introduce bending at the top of some tapes, though that's usually frame TBCs on badly dubbed or EP tapes. We don't have EP tapes in Europe. I'm not suggesting he should use a frame TBC.
And everyone seems to have forgotten: Stianbø is located in Norway, not Los Angeles. The odds of him finding 6, 12, or 30 PAL-format SVHS vcrs with built-in line TBC are pretty small. If he does find them, they won't be cheap: Panasonic NV-FS200 and JVC HR-S7965EK were not bargain VCRs when new, and are highly coveted second hand. Since Norway has no apparent eBay affiliation, where exactly is Stianbø supposed to find these elusive VCRs, quickly and affordably and in working condition?
Cheers,
David. -
I must've missed the part where scanning text came into the equation. I know of several "OCR" acronyms, but none seems on-topic. So I have to admit to still being a bit lost here. I'm surprised to see anybody get good OCR results from low-resolution images (SD video).
With enough funds, patience and watch-dogging of appropriate sites, you'll find them in due time.
Tearing on tapes is not related to recording mode. It does, however, mostly happen on NTSC video (even though there's no science letting PAL off the hook, as it's a "VHS thing" and not an "NTSC thing"). FYI, tearing is explained here in detail: Why does tape picture bending happen?
Image wiggling inherent to the format is removed by a line TBC, which will help OCR.Want my help? Ask here! (not via PM!)
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