What hardware/workflow do the big VHS-to-digital companies use?

[Darryl In Canada]

I'ld like to learn about the hardware/workflow of the major VHS to digital companies like Legacy Box, Capture, Kodak, and others. Does anyone have first- or second-hand knowledge on what they use?

Smaller companies with YouTube channels allows us to see the workflow. For instance, the guy at Emerald Coast Digitizing uses mostly Panasonic VHS VCRs (the blueline ones) and an Elgato for capture. The GotMemories guy uses VHS VCRs (looks like most of them are Panasonic ES35V) and an Elgato for capture. They will clean moldy tapes and fix the casettes as part of their service, which is infinitely more than what the large places do, so if I didn't have my own equipment, I would use them instead of the larger companies. But their VCR and capture devices are mid-level, with many of the experts on the boards poo-pooing the Elgato.

I assume there are many hobbyists with good equipment (S-VHS VCR, S-Video cable, top-ranked capture card) who digitize tapes as a sideline. Curious if they use their best equipment for their regular clients or only only for special projects from production companies who need the best possible capture for a documentary or something.

[timtape]

This may not be what some want to hear but ...it's not simply the workflow. It's also the condition of each item in that workflow, including the playback VCR, plus the skills and knowledge of the person operating it to get the best out of each individual tape as it's digitised.

Then there's the condition and standard of each tape to be digitised. All things equal, the better the recording the better result. But all things arent equal. A top transfer of a terrible recording can look far worse that a mediocre transfer of a top recording. But regardless of the facility, we dont have access to the tapes they are digitizing so without that reference we often cant be sure how well they have done the work.

Digitizing can be strange work because when everything is going well, a trained monkey could get good results. Just insert the tape and press a few buttons. All the hard work of setting up and maintaining a good system has been done before the operator came along. But one slight problem with a machine or a tape and the difficulty level can go way beyond the operator's abilities. They may just assume the tape itself is faulty and tell the customer nothing more can be done, when the playback deck may just need a slight tweak to optimise playback of that tape. Or more serious work done on the media or the equipment.

I wont mention any names but ex staff from one large digitizing company have anonymously reported very poor standards including almost no training for staff and the cheapest gear used. But to the average person in the street their advertisements can seem very convincing. Very well produced. Nothing wrong with that but we may not get to see either their gear or their product.

I service and repair digitising gear especially tape based gear for a few companies. Usually, the only information I can glean about transfer quality is from the condition of the gear they send me for repair. One small company's VCR's have come to me with dangerously dirty tape paths (dangerous for the customers' tapes), as if they only use a cleaning tape and never do a serious manual tape path clean. Another company sent me their cassette deck only because the deck had so badly chewed the customer's tape that parts of the tape were permanently damaged and the cassette was now jammed in the machine. I had to work out a way to carefully retrieve the cassette without further damaging the tape so it could be returned to the customer.

A deck with one small fault can destroy a customer's tape. It doesnt matter whether it's a pro deck or the bottom of the range. Once an irreplaceable tape recording is damaged or destroyed it's game over.

A problem can be when the owners of the companies while excellent at business and marketing are not skilled in the area of media digitization. Do they know what are the highest standards? How do they judge whom to employ?

You can probably tell this area is one of my hobby horses. I'll now dismount!

[lordsmurf]

The big companies use garbage, quantity of tapes processed over quality of conversions.

Don't aspire to be them. You can do better.

[DB83]

Or to put it another way, time = money. "We do not 'waste' time to get it right when there is another loser in the queue."
And the moral of this is, if you have enough tapes, learn how to do this yourself. The end cost could be less than you pay these 'big' companies (and, potentially, sell on the hardware/software) and you get the satisfactiion that the end result is what you wanted all along.

[timtape]

In my experience it's not always greed. Some of those I've got to know a little, may not know any better.

Plus if they are the only ones to digitise a customer's particular tape, neither they or their customer will get to see someone else's better - or worse- or similar- result.

Forums like this are great in that we can upload and share digitised results, but that's not the actual tape. How often do we share one of our tapes with a fellow member to see whether someone else can do a better or worse job?

Facts and evidence are wonderful things but for some they can be viewed as mere optional extras.

[cbehr91]

The Gotmemories.com guy has done YouTube videos where he is capturing tapes using consumer VHS decks and Elgato USB sticks.

[Gary34]

I know an employee. https://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/video-capture/14178-legacybox-rip-off.html

[Gary34]

To answer the question more directly Legacybox/Kodak digitizing/Southtree which all are owned by AMB media and are all operating in the same building. It’s the same company.

They leave customers videos in a non climate controlled warehouse for months before digitizing them. They digitize VHS in VCRs that are in really bad shape. They use one computer to capture from 16 VCRs at once. Each VCR is connected to a splitter (MT-VIKI 4 Way 3 RCA Splitter Composite Video Audio Distribution (1 in 4 Out). They only use two of the outputs. One output goes to the composite security system which displays all 16 videos on one screen. The other output goes to a Haugpauge HD PVR 2. The splitter acts up and hinders video and audio sometimes and the tech won’t know it unless they press stop of if they know that box has a tendency to do that they can view the TS file and see that one isn’t counting. Four of the Haugpauge cards connect to a 4 in 1 out ankr device then the 4 ankr devices go into the 4 USB ports on a Sonnet USB 3 PCLE card inside of a Mac Pro (G5). Then they have another computer for archiving. That’s one rack. There were 5 racks per person and that makes up a POD. So one person watches 80 captures.

Their software was developed by https://youtu.be/NquPjE60toA?si=j5CPKsJpEO2c-LiG. When they coded the capture software they didn’t set up the left and right channels correctly so something flying from left to right sounds like right to left. The system they created also doesn’t allow for editing of blue screens. The files transferred to a flash drive and DVD are split into 2 hour increments. If the video had 2 hour and 30 minutes of stuff, then there would be 30 minutes of blue screen at the end of the clip.

Most of the blame for those transfers being bad isn’t really on the workers. The workers don’t really get a good preview of what is going on because their preview is coming from a split before the capture card instead of the capture cards output and their management pushes them to just get numbers. Their management knows their transfers are bad and just doesn’t care. They actually were starting to have super sections by the time my contact left. They started to have every tapes section be a dedicated 12-rack super section for one specific format. They added so many racks so there'd be enough time to let the first rack finish by the time you're done with rack 12, and God help you if you take more than 2 hours to switch all 12! That’s 192 tapes for one person. They just want warm bodies to push buttons. I don’t know if they stayed with the 192 at once. That wasn’t that long ago though. It’s all marketing with them.

[Gary34]

Here are some pictures of there hardware.

[timtape]

I assume there are many hobbyists with good equipment (S-VHS VCR, S-Video cable, top-ranked capture card) who digitize tapes as a sideline. Curious if they use their best equipment for their regular clients or only only for special projects from production companies who need the best possible capture for a documentary or something.

Again it's not just the equipment, though obviously it should perform to a minimum standard.


"Quality vs quantity" is an important tradeoff. While it's possible to get excellent results with mass parallel ingest, the risks in quality dropoff increase.

On quantity I once worked for a large organisation and at monthly meetings of the organisation's entire staff the manager's report didnt mention the quality of our digitised product, only how many tapes had been digitised. The fact is measuring quality and demonstrating quality is much harder to do compared to just quoting hours or tapes digitised. Organisations large and small can make big claims that they do their work "to archival standards" while showing little or no evidence of their product.

If a production company wants some footage digitised it may only be one tape, and just one section of that one tape. So here the quality vs quantity issue is no longer relevent. But the production company staff, who may be highly skilled in their own field, may have no way of playing the obsolete format tape safely and at best quality, which is why they farmed the work out to someone else. So they may be just trusting that the digitised product is as good as it can be.