Capturing PAL at highest quality possible

[luckyo]

Hi

I am trying to get the maximum of a PAL (CCIR) signal I am recording with an AJA IO XT in terms of quality.
With AJA/FCP I can record uncompressed, ProRes, 8, 10 bit, but I wonder if that just increases the file size but gives me no increase in quality.
In other words if the source is PAL I could also record it in H.264 and it would be no difference.

Also the video I am recording is black and white and thus I wonder if the bit depth also regards the greys or only colors.
If there is anything else with which I can increase the quality of the output, I would be happy if you could share.

Thank you!

[jagabo]

Highest possible quality? That would be 10 bit uncomrpessed. But will you notice a difference between that and a well encoded 8 bit h264 video that's 1/20 the size from a capture device that costs 1/10 as much? Probably not.

[KarMa]

Also no real chroma info to retain, besides it giving blank data for the whole video, if you are doing 4:2:0 H.264. Data which would probably be easy to compress. Going with some 4:4:4 lossless is a lot of wasted bitrate on chroma.

[luckyo]

Thank you for your answers. I have both capture devices and I know the file size will be much bigger.
But I would be willing to deal with the bigger file size if I can increase the quality in any way.
I also thought if someone for example needs to digitize older movies and try to get the best quality, maybe someone has
done this and could give some tricks and tips, how to get the best quality out of this source.
Thanks again.

[DB83]

Well you can not increase the quality from pure uncompressed.

Most on here would not do that anyway and just use a lossless format such as lagarith.

Capture is not the be all and end all of the process. Especially if you dealing with older stuff such as VHS. Post-processing is of equal importance.

[jagabo]

Once you have a decent capture device (those start around US$30) that lets you capture uncompressed or losslessly compressed YUV, the quality you get has much more to do with how you process the video after capturing. And if you're capturing VHS (or other) tape the player and a line TBC are more important than the capture device. See the many posts around here dealing with restoration.