1969 Memorex 1" videotape with NASA Apollo (?) material

[dellsam34]

DV is not native, lossless AVI 4:2:2 8/10bit YUV is native, it's called native because it hasn't been encoded to any codec yet.

They can capture 8bit and pass the captures through vdub2 and output as HuffUYV, that's a big chunk of file size saving without loosing any quality. They can also use BM MediaExpress instead of NLE software for capturing.

[Dutchsteammachine]

Avi 8/10 bit YUV sounds good. I thought avi was just a container and can contain any codec. Are we assuming they mean lossless/raw rgb?

Is it best to capture and deliver at native NTSC resolution? What would that be?

They said they normally deliver 720p mp4 but can at any.

[DB83]

Allow me to 'join the party'.

While avi can, theoretically, contain any codec, pure uncompressed video does not have a codec in the first place. But pure uncompressed is a waste of filesize/bitrate and noone should suggest you go down that route. Lossless (huffyuv etc) are good intermediates but I dount this firm will do that. One level below that and you arrive at DV.


But this transfer firm is doing their best to 'blind you with science'. Rather than confuse you the more with 'Native', NTSC DV will be 720*480 interlaced. That is all you need to know.

[DB83]

But I just wonder if there are other, more local, avenues that you can explore.

What about universites that have practical courses in broadcast video. Or even museums ?


Then there would be national, not regional, state broadcasters - the equivilent of our BBC - which could also have the necc. equip.


And then, failing that, expand to near neighbours such as Germany.


Sending these tapes back in the mail is itself risky unless you would be prepared to take them yourself and witness the transfer first-hand.

[Cornucopia]

Since co-dec can mean compressor-decompressor but also mean (en)coder-decoder, that can apply to uncompressed formats as well.

And you are missing a stage there, @DB83. Uncompressed, lossless compressed, virtually-lossless lossy (e.g. cineform, prores, dnxhd), then your standard lossy intra (dv, mjpeg, jp2k, mpeg intras), then interframe lossy. That's the full progression. And for something of this historical cache, I would hope/expect either lossless or virtually-lossless.

But you are right, the source is SD, so any "pro" transfer should NOT be also attempting upscaling, unless specifically requested (and for archival purposes, I would expect it would NOT be requested).


Scott

[Dutchsteammachine]

So an NTSC capture would be 480p, 486, 525 or 576? From what I understand it is 480p without the blanking interval so that should capture all vertical fields.

These things become a bit of a rabbit hole the more you look into it the more you get into infinite technical details.

I don't want to be that client that tells everyone what to do but I also don't want some 1080p deinterlaced h264 file that may be fine for most people's home movies but not for archival purposes.


I couldn't find any place that has ntsc type A in the Netherlands or UK. I could try searching in German of french or Italy I guess.

[Dutchsteammachine]

This google drive link points to all the footage I collected on a type C PAL machine, a few minutes of the landing tape and second EVA tape:". Audio from track3/timecode.

[DB83]

I really did not want to go down this route since the more info leads to more confusion. But....

Technically, NTSC is an analog system that has 525 discrete interlaced 'lines'. When you capture this, the maximum vertical resolution is 486 pixels. However very few capture devices can provide for that and the defacto is 480 pixels. 'p' means progressive and an interlaced source should NEVER be captured as progressive. So an analog(ue) NTSC source such as what you have here is captured as 480i


576 has nothing to do with NTSC. It is the PAL discrete 625 interlaced 'lines' thus captured as 576i

[dellsam34]

So an NTSC capture would be 480p, 486, 525 or 576? From what I understand it is 480p without the blanking interval so that should capture all vertical fields.

These things become a bit of a rabbit hole the more you look into it the more you get into infinite technical details.

I don't want to be that client that tells everyone what to do but I also don't want some 1080p deinterlaced h264 file that may be fine for most people's home movies but not for archival purposes.

NTSC from a pro tape capture device is 720x486 interlaced, 704x480 being the approximate active video area, Don't let them do any de-interlacing or upscaling and certainly not 720p, 720p doesn't make any sense nowadays, no 720 native panels been made and your HD/4K TV will upscale to HD/4K on the fly anyway, so you are at the mercy of your TV's upscaler quality. Instead have them capture it at AVI 4:2:2 8bit YUV2 (10bit RGB doesn't work with certain lossless compressors such as HuffYUV), apply some sort of lossless compression to save storage space and send them to you.

Once you receive your files you can work on them yourself, just open a new thread and you will get help with de-interlacing, cropping, upscaling or whatever processing you may need.

[Dutchsteammachine]

Thanks for your help everyone, I really appreciate it very much.

Yes I was confused with their mention of 720p too. I will stress that I want 480i or 486i and certainly do not want them to do any upscaling and deintercaling.

Was there a time when hardware upscaling/deintercaling was better than software? Is software recommended now in post for derivative files?

[dellsam34]

480i, there is no final format with 486 lines, 6 extra lines are for broadcast standard for signaling (aspect ratio, caption, teletext ...etc).
Upscaling/de-interlacing is better done in software, not all hardware are good at it especially at the consumer level.

[ConsumerDV]

576 has nothing to do with NTSC. It is the PAL discrete 625 interlaced 'lines' thus captured as 576i

Not that I want to go down this route, but neither 576 nor 625 has anything to do with PAL

[DB83]

576 has nothing to do with NTSC. It is the PAL discrete 625 interlaced 'lines' thus captured as 576i

Not that I want to go down this route, but neither 576 nor 625 has anything to do with PAL

Well even at my age I am willing to learn. So pray explain the above. Not that it has anything to do with this topic.

[ConsumerDV]

Well even at my age I am willing to learn. So pray explain the above. Not that it has anything to do with this topic.

It has nothing to do with this topic. 625 is the total number of lines of all 50 Hz systems, which have been collectively known as 625/50i. Not PAL, not SECAM, not NIIR. Basically, any system that is not System J, M (which can be called NTSC, because NTSC does necessarily stand for color system) and not a System E, F. I am willing to accept "PAL" (in quotes) as a stand-in for 625/50i You may enjoy the article linked above... or not

[dellsam34]

Well even at my age I am willing to learn. So pray explain the above. Not that it has anything to do with this topic.

I hear you DB83, some people are desperate for attention, they latch on anything stupid they can argue about to make a useless point.

[Dutchsteammachine]

So capture and delivery at 480/486i60 in AVI YUV 8-bit would be good?

Preferably a lossless compressed codec like ffv1 and huffyuv but I havent asked if they can do that.

[dellsam34]

Read post #71 again, 480 not 486.

[Dutchsteammachine]

Wouldnt 486 give a little more headroom?

[Brad]

IMO they may as well give you 486 if they can. You can always crop it yourself. My Hi8 recordings from one Sony camcorder use 484 full lines and 2 half-lines.

[dellsam34]

Wouldnt 486 give a little more headroom?

You're still going to have to crop off 6 lines, 486 is not a legal resolution.

[ConsumerDV]

You're still going to have to crop off 6 lines, 486 is not a legal resolution.

What do you mean by saying it is not a legal resolution?

[Cornucopia]

If you are playing direct from computer, there is no issue with 486. If, OTOH, you intend to export a copy to some shared media (DVD, BD), or for use with embedded device players, or possibly with uploading to shared sites (e.g. Youtube), you will have some-to-much issue until you crop to 480. And, other than as an archive (where you might want to extract closed-captioning, smpte timecode, etc), you don't need/won't use those extra 6 lines.

Just like, if you capture to 4:2:2, other than for improved preservation and editing flexibility, you likely won't notice the difference in playback vs. standard 4:2:0 consumer formats - which you WILL need to end up with for all those shared options, as very, very few players support 4:2:2 other than direct pc playback (and even then, the computer has to be properly outfitted w/ codecs).

Both options are noble approaches for use in the professional, archival domain, but are not only superfluous but are problematic in the generic consumer domain.

Scott

[Brad]

If, OTOH, you intend to export a copy to some shared media (DVD, BD), or for use with embedded device players, or possibly with uploading to shared sites (e.g. Youtube), you will have some-to-much issue until you crop to 480.

If we're uploading to YouTube, we want to upscale anyway (forcing it to preserve temporal resolution and crunch the quality less). As part of the upscale, we can preserve as many picture lines as available rather than cropping down to 480. Not that 1.3% (maximum) more lines really matters, but...

The bigger advantage of grabbing the top lines for my Hi8 captures is that I can crop more of the skewed head-switch lines off of the bottom without having to pad. I assume these NASA tapes also have visible head-switching.

[rrats]

Maybe in theory, but like, not many people care about head switching

[dellsam34]

If we're uploading to YouTube, we want to upscale anyway (forcing it to preserve temporal resolution and crunch the quality less). As part of the upscale, we can preserve as many picture lines as available rather than cropping down to 480. Not that 1.3% (maximum) more lines really matters, but...
The bigger advantage of grabbing the top lines for my Hi8 captures is that I can crop more of the skewed head-switch lines off of the bottom without having to pad. I assume these NASA tapes also have visible head-switching.

Yes, that's what I do, I keep any active lines at the top and remove the same number from the head switch at the bottom, My point was that the final resolution has to come down to 480 unless resizing is planned.

[Dutchsteammachine]

Is i60 basically the same as i29.97 just a different methodology of wording?

Yes resizing is planned, if possible I would like some extra headroom and have them captured at 486.

Regardless, type A resolution is approx 405 lines and if it is an aerial feed it will be lower with noise and radio interference and stuff.
Add to that the 200 lines resolution of the Apollo 11 EVA TV camera and the unfortunate fact that SSTV to NTSC conversion was done optically... I don't think a few pixels off will matter.

It is going to be blurry even by SD standards. Hopefully some things can be mitigated with modern restoration.

[DB83]

Essentially, yes. 'Modern' thinking prefer to deal in whole numbers. So 29.97i which is 30000/1001 ia abbreviated to 30i

Then consider the number of fields per complete picture and we get 30*2 = 60i.


Of course this only works for interlaced streams ie 30i/60i. 60p will mean 60 fps

[dellsam34]

Is i60 basically the same as i29.97 just a different methodology of wording?

I don't think I've ever seen 30i or 25i written this way, But basically if you see 60i expect interlaced contents, 30 or 30p could mean a de-interlaced content originally interlaced or pure digital progressive contents.

Yes resizing is planned, if possible I would like some extra headroom and have them captured at 486.

In that case de-interlace the 720x486 footage, crop to bare active area respecting the ratio 704:480 (few pixels off is fine and hard to notice), then resize from whatever resulting resolution to 1440x1080, make sure the crop/resize is done in one go otherwise you end up with file that has a weird resolution and may not be recognized when you try to resize it, The best tool for this is avpsmod, you add de-interlace, crop and resize scripts in one sequence.

[rrats]

Why is 486 vertical pixels considered a weird resolution

[dellsam34]

I wasn't referring to 486 by weird resolution, Read the post again.