pcie capture card for vhs

[hdfills]

hello im after buying a pcie capture card that is good for capturing vhs - i have a blackmagic intensity 4k card already but always getting dropped frames and its not good .... any help would be appreciated

[FLP437]

One of the best options will be a Magewell pro capture hdmi with composite, s-video, component and hdmi. it does have a very large buffer 256 Mb so dropped frames will be a thing of the past . I have used it to capture vhs , video 8 and it gave me excellent results.Very easy to install and very flexible and versatile .
I do have one for about 2 years and I think it's one of the best you can get nowadays. Price about 320€
http://www.magewell.com/products/pro-capture-hdmi

[Eric-jan]

hello im after buying a pcie capture card that is good for capturing vhs - i have a blackmagic intensity 4k card already but always getting dropped frames and its not good .... any help would be appreciated

Do you know for shure your storage device, is fast enough during the capture ? and you are capturing to normal resolution like 720x480 or 720x576 ?
Also a BlackMagic Design device expects a good quality video signal, so the vcr should have minimal some sort of build in TBC, a regular vcr without this, will not be a good source, since BMD products are quality devices, for the prosumer.
For a Magewell product the story is the same, without stabization you will have dropped frames.
A DV box or a passthrough device like a miniDV or Digital8 camera will give no dropped frames, and will be a cheaper solution, or if you have enough money to spend,
and know what to buy, you could try to find an external TBC, this will be enough for the setup you now have.

[lordsmurf]

it does have a very large buffer 256 Mb so dropped frames will be a thing of the past

Not really. 256mb is just several frames.

Magewell dropping frames with SD material (VHS,etc) is as well documented as Blackmagic dropping frames -- regardless of the presence of TBC.

I wish the device worked better. But it doesn't.

A DV box or a passthrough device like a miniDV or Digital8 camera will give no dropped frames

This is also false. A DV box can and does drop frames like any other capture card.

And then with DV, you also have 50%+ 4:1:1 color loss to deal with, if the source is NTSC. (PAL 4:2:0 DV is fine.)

[FLP437]

Not really. 256mb is just several frames.

720x576=414720 pixels
Uncompressed RGB 8 bit frame (0,4 MPx3x8 bits/pixel) 1,24 MB

So not really only several frames, indeed in excess of 200 for analog sd footage. This buffer size is quite uncommon and not usually seen in capture cards only justifiable because it is a 2kp60 HDMI board that offers internal scaling, deinterlacing, etc. via FPGA.

I wanted only to evidence my experience, others can have a different one ,as I have been the owner of one magewell card for more then 2 years and I have captured more than 500 hundred tapes (VHS, video8 and HI 8) without any problems so far namely related to lost or inserted frames.

This card has a strong design around an Analog Devices ADV7842 chipset and a Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA chip including fast 256 MB onboard memory. Has extensive presets capture formats and supports a large number of color spaces and can delivery 8 bits or 10 bits. Also it will work with windows 7, 8.1 or 10 , linux or Mac . Being a pcie 2.0 card you will have also a better DMA bandwidth. 400MB/s per channel, is compatible with all DirectShow apps and support DirectGMA and GPUdirect for AMD and Nvidia video adapter chipsets. As new 4k and 4k+ new versions have been released the price also came down and now it's possible to buy it for about 240€.

The osprey series are also not too bad for analog sd material capture (210e/260e ) however they still are affected by the lost frames even if the problem is not as acute as with others namely usb capture devices ( ati hd 600 usb ,startech usb3hdcap, etc).

Before I bought this Magewell card I used to work for VHS with a Panasonic DVD recorder as pass-through in between a SVHS JVC HR-S9500 and an HDMI capture device. The results were good and consistent however similar to a direct capture with the magewell card. I also used an AVT 8710 TBC but it slightly degraded the image and it was necessary to correct it with avisynth .Furthermore these TBC are difficult to find , expensive and a lot of them do have problems.

[lordsmurf]

A 2mb buffer in a VCR holds just a couple lines of analog video in the buffer, and that's it. 200mb would be a several hundred lines, or a couple fields, several frames. Where are you getting your information from?

It's also YUV, not RGB.

I don't think we're talking about the same thing here.

And buffer doesn't really matter if the device bungles the data.

An AVT-8710 degrades an image if you're using the flawed black version, not the good green one. (Yes, TBCs vary a lot, especially due to chips. I've done extensive testing of quite a few TBCs over the years.)

[JVRaines]

I am a fan of the Osprey 260e (if you have component video and/or balanced audio) or the 210e. Hardware and software designed by people who understand legacy analog video.