which capture card is best for vhs and hi8 capture

[hdfills]

AJA KONA LHi - Or - Blackmagic intensity 4k .... i have both but have not had time to try the AJA KONA card yet .... any advice will be appreciated

[LMotlow]

Blackmagic intensity 4k

One of the worst products, never designed or made for capturing analog source. Very bad idea. Haven't you seen all the bad press published here for years?

[hdfills]

thank you for your reply .... i know i can trust what you say so i will use the aja kona

[Eric-jan]

Blackmagic intensity 4k

One of the worst products, never designed or made for capturing analog source. Very bad idea. Haven't you seen all the bad press published here for years?

Bad press ? nothing have been pressed, these are professional products, nothing wrong with these products, what's wrong is, is the quality of the analog (VHS) video signal.
There are no miracle capture devices, only devices that are more foregiving accepting a bad video signal, which is not due to any quality of the capture device,
A passthrough device or a "TBC" function is needed in either case, or use the component video output, of some combo recorders or dvd recorders, component video came with some of the latest consumer devices at the end of the analog age, component video has not been used that much in the professional sector.
the advantage with these (semi) pro capture cards is also, that a recent and a mature OS can be used, for capture speed needed for un-compressed captures.

[hdfills]

Blackmagic intensity 4k

One of the worst products, never designed or made for capturing analog source. Very bad idea. Haven't you seen all the bad press published here for years?

Bad press ? nothing have been pressed, these are professional products, nothing wrong with these products, what's wrong is, is the quality of the analog (VHS) video signal.
There are no miracle capture devices, only devices that are more foregiving accepting a bad video signal, which is not due to any quality of the capture device,
A passthrough device or a "TBC" function is needed in either case.

thank you for your reply , to be honest ive had no issues with the blackmagic (well after they had there drivers sorted in the 4k cards early days ) .... but i have read the aja kona card maybe better for the captures ..... just trying new things thats all

[Eric-jan]

Yes, the options for resolutions could be better, also because of the choice of video input options, The Intensity Shuttle has a few options more in that case. (capturing in progressive mode)
Both Windows (10) OS, or MAC hardware are not helping also..
downgrading software should not be needed.

[audioresearch]

I'd like to convert old 720x480 vhs, 8mm, and hi8 videos to digital computer files such as avi, mp4, mkv and buy a capture device that will work on my Windows 10 64 bit computer. I do not want to convert to dvd files.

When I output the source material I use a vcr or camcorder and in both cases the output goes out through composite cables with rca plugs on either end (the red, yellow, white cables). Some of my vcrs do NOT have the S-video output, so any capture device I get must be able to handle the video feed coming over an rca "yellow" cable.

I'd prefer to buy the lowest cost device whose video and audio quality will not noticeably degrade the existing video and audio quality of the sources. Used devices that are cheap on ebay would be just fine and with the ebay money-back guarantee, I'm not really taking any chances buying this on ebay since if it doesn't work they way I like, I can always return it and ebay itself automatically issues me a full refund including shipping.

The device should be able to write to an avi or mp4 or mkv file in full 720x480 SD resolution at a high enough bit rate for very good quality. I read specs for one device and even though it advertised it could write to avi files, reading the specs in depth showed that it did that only at degraded resolutions worse than 720x480 and I don't want anything with such a limitation or any similar limitation where you have to read between the lines to decode misleading advertising.

I don't want to see things added that were not originally in the source like pixelization, noticeable dropped frames, changes in video speed, garbled audio, out-of-sync audio, etc.

I don't care if the device doesn't work well with the software that comes with it so long as it will capture when I use Premiere on Windows 10 or perhaps OBS studio.

Any suggestions on what I should buy? Thanks!

[dellsam34]

The Yellow is the composite video not Red, Neither Premiere nor OBS are the right apps to capture analog video. If you are looking for the cheapest device you shouldn't have to worry about the quality, You should look for a good capture device that works with your OS and keep an eye until you find the right price, not the other way around.

[audioresearch]

Thanks for spotting the error, I edited my post to read "yellow" cable.

Yes, I definitely only want to consider good cards and I'm not interested in buying any cheap cards that are not good.

I see capture devices on ebay called "dazzle"/Corel and Elgato, etc and have no idea if those are good or not.

In my opinion, the best quality videos I made were with a Canon GL1 camcorder that recorded DV files onto mini-DV tape. I then copied digitally over firewire those DV files from the Canon camcorder onto much lower cost 8mm tape using as a target my Sony D8 camcorder and I archived those tapes into my video library.

So, the capture device I'm interested in buying need be no better quality than to capture the above file type shot on a Canon GL1 and not make it look or sound any worse.

If you can recommend a capture device that would be at least that good and no worse that costs the least, that would help me a lot. I don't want to buy relative junk but I also don't want to buy something expensive that might have quality that is much better that I would never see because my source videos were not good enough to match it.

I should add that I watch video on a 50" 4k tv that I bought for $218 at Walmart. When I watch my old SD videos they are, of course, limited to less than 100% of the tv screen area.

[dellsam34]

To be honest I have no experience nor willing to experiment with all this no name new devices such as easycap, Elgato, Roxio clones and the likes, I have only heard horror stories about them, The other thing is Windows 10 and Mac are not really good platforms for capturing an ancient analog format such as VHS. The key to a successful capture is Windows 7 with a PCI card or USB device from late 90's/2000's, ATI, Diamond, Pinnacle and the likes, But all these in most cases require a TBC or a DVD recorder as a pass-thru to get a stable capture.

Other alternatives such as using a professional capture device that captures analog video to SDI SD standard (lossless AVI 4:2:2), this will take the task of capturing analog video out of the hands of a modern OS and then use a SDI/PCIe card or SDI/USB3 adapter to get the SDI digital video into your computer, Such adapters work well with Wind10 and Mac and are well supported by any modern OS. The other advantage of this workflow is you don't need an external TBC or DVD recorder, Such devices are built into some sort of TBC to stabilize the picture to conform to the professional analog video standards in a studio environment.

[audioresearch]

So if feed the composite video over red/white/yellow rca jack cables into my dvd recorder then feed the dvd recorder's output through red/white/yellow rca jack cables to a capture card, the dvd recorder acts as a timebase corrector? If that's what you meant, and I think it is, then that is extremely useful information that I did not know-thanks!!!

I kept 3 Dell tower PCs that were new circa 2005 that have pci buses and so I am already setup to use the old capture cards you referred to. I'll look on Ebay for some of those old capture cards.

The method I've been using to convert my vhs/8mm/hi8 analog videos has been to record them onto physical dvd-r disks using my dvd recorder and then load those dvd disks into my win10 tower pc's dvd drive and copy them to hard drives then I erase the dvd-r and reuse it. That has actually been working very well.

But I have a huge library of tapes and fear that continuing to use that method will wear out my dvd recorder which I really want to keep in good working order. I learned long ago to keep old equipment that still works because one never knows when in the future it might be needed for unforeseen reasons. And if my dvd recorder acts as a TBC, well that just proves that point.

[stunner21]

I've used both AJA and Blackmagic and honestly the resulting captures you'll get are almost identical if you stack them on top of one another, the blackmagic maybe a tiny bit more sensitive to dropout but if your pushing a decent signal at it with a TBC I've not had any real issues on either system. The only difference really is the AJA ecosystem is a bit more in depth and personally I prefer its layout as it makes a bit more sense to setup. I'd say if you use resolve a lot and want a fullscreen monitor as well as a capture device then use blackmagic if your not then aja is a nicer system however they do have a habit of discontinuing support for their cards to work natively in host applications so watch out if you have an older used card.

[lordsmurf]

For SD, you're much better off with certain cards from ATI and Pinnacle -- and at a lower cost, so bonus. (Not just any ATI or Pinnacle, specific ones.) HD cards were never intended for consumer SD sources like VHS.

OBS is the wrong software. That's streaming software that does a half@ss job of analog capture. Use VirtualDub 1.9.x

An ES10/15 acts as a TBC(ish), and is not an actual TBC. There is a fail rate, but it depends on your tapes. The capture cards and VCR becomes even more important when using mere TBC(ish). The better setup is ES10/15 + DataVideo DVK. You still have drawback of ES10/15, but not as many with DVK in workflow. More ideal is an actual TBC, those just work, no problems to watch for. The TBC(ish) is a hackish solution.

[DavesArchives]

I have found the best results in my work by splitting the SVID output to BNC, then converting to SDI. From there, I use a field recorder to capture the image in PRORES. I have several TBCs, but my TBC of choice is the Key West Big Voodoo 10. I've had quite a few different TBCs and this one has never had issues. Even though my Panasonic AG-1980 has a TBC built in, I still use the Big Voodoo in the workflow.