Horizontal Red and Green Lines (GV-USB2)

[Sharc]

Thank you, I will try the Display button on the remote for DNR. If it does nothing I'll assume my unit doesn't do DNR (which is good).

I don't have your model, but see the manual page 35 about Playback NR and Copy NR (NR=noise reduction) settings. (I would just set them to OFF.)

[Alwyn]

I looked at your guide and my model isn't there, nor is it in the thread it links to about brightness on S-Video. I assume it's still best to use S-Video and it won't introduce any extra brightness etc.

The 35V is essentially the same as the the Panasonic DVD recorders in my guide eg ES-15. The only real difference is it has the VHS player in the same box. The menus on the ES35 are basically the same as the ES-15. My guide is tailored to somebody using a standalone VCR + the ES-15 as a stabiliser.

Ultimately I'm wanting to know if using this Panasonic ES35 will give me better output than my more standard/cheaper VCR I used before (Sanyo combo DVD player model HV-DX300A using composite).

Yes it will be, because it is applying the Diga stabilisation.

One thing I am confused about in your guide: it talks about routing through the AV inputs, but why? My setup is simple, I am playing a VHS tape in my Panasonic unit and outputting through the 'priority' AV port on the back straight to a GV-USB2 capture device. Why would I need to input anything to my Panasonic? Is your guide only talking about handycam capture?

My guide is tailored to using the ES-15 between a VCR and your digitiser so yes, there is no need for you to use any AV inputs with your ES-35. I pointed you to my guide only for the menus. Sorry for the confusion. Of course, if you find a tape that will only play nicely in a different VCR, you can use your ES-35 as a stabiliser, similar to the ES-15, as I describe.

[WhiteboyUltima]

Thank you both (Alwyn and Sharc).

I eventually found the Playback DNR option - I had to go to DVD mode, then press Display to see more options. No sign of Copy DNR options, but Playback DNR was off by default. So I can now start capturing my VHS again over S-Video. I assume Diga Stabilisation is always on, as there are no options anywhere for that (but the unit does have the Diga logo on the DVD tray so I hope it's working when I play tapes and use the Priority outputs). Cheers!

[WhiteboyUltima]

Update: I have now captured my 2 VHS tapes with the Panasonic DMR-ES35V in VirtualDub2, no compression, using the S-Video connection and no DNR. I am very happy with the results! The Hanover Bars are basically gone, which was unexpected - so it looks like I don't even need to run the script to remove them. The s-video and the Diga technology cleaned things up nicely, and there's no audio desync issues.

My question now is about dropped/inserted frames. I used the same settings for both my tape captures and did them one after another without touching anything else on my PC. For the wedding video (20 mins long, most of which is just a slideshow with music), VirtualDub2 reported it dropped 0 frames and inserted only 2 frames - compare that to my last capture on the Sanyo VCR with composite connection where it inserted 107 frames. Big improvement!

However, the other video (a 40 min birthday party VHS originally recorded on a handycam) had a much worse result (see pic) compared to the last time I captured it on my basic Sanyo VCR. It dropped 1432 frames and inserted 1435 frames (so about a minute's worth of frames were inserted/dropped). My original Sanyo capture for this tape had only 242 dropped frames and 289 inserted. Note my original capture on the Sanyo had HuffyUV lossless compression (for the birthday video but not the wedding video), and the new capture on the Pana ES35V was done with no compression. I expected a better result, just like I got with the wedding video.

Does anyone have any idea why there are so many more dropped/inserted frames? And would this actually make any visible difference to the overall 40 minute video?

Should I capture again with lossless compression this time? (If anything, I thought enabling compression would cause more dropped/inserted frames since it uses more CPU power... I have a powerful Radeon 9800X3D computer and am writing to fast PCI4.0 NVME M.2 storage)


[Attachment 90117 - Click to enlarge]

[Sharc]

Much too many drops/inserts in either case. Unless your tape is in poor condition - or you captured empty gaps (i.e. noisy unused tape sections) on the tape between scenes - you should not get more than very few drops/inserts per hour, say 0 .... 4 maximum.
And yes you should capture YUV 4:2:2 using a lossless codec like huffyuv or similar (like Lagarith or UTVideo). Raw or RGB captures cause high data transfer rates which may overload your system producing dropped frames. Don't be fooled by low CPU usage only. Capture to a fast enough defragmented drive or SSD.
Yes, you should recapture your tapes. Also revisit your Vdub capture settings, or try AmarecTV instead of Vdub. You may want to follow @Alwyn's guide on this.
The effect of pairs of drop+inserts is stutter during playback, the effect of uncompensated drops is usually loss of AV sync.

[WhiteboyUltima]

Much too many drops/inserts in either case. Unless your tape is in poor condition - or you captured empty gaps (i.e. noisy unused tape sections) on the tape between scenes - you should not get more than very few drops/inserts per hour, say 0 .... 4 maximum.
And yes you should capture YUV 4:2:2 using a lossless codec like huffyuv or similar (like Lagarith or UTVideo). Raw or RGB captures cause high data transfer rates which may overload your system producing dropped frames. Don't be fooled by low CPU usage only. Capture to a fast enough defragmented drive or SSD.
Yes, you should recapture your tapes. Also revisit your Vdub capture settings, or try AmarecTV instead of Vdub. You may want to follow @Alwyn's guide on this.
The effect of pairs of drop+inserts is stutter during playback, the effect of uncompensated drops is usually loss of AV sync.

At this rate with the amount of times I've played/rewound these tapes, I am worried they will wear out if I keep trying to play them... we're talking 35 years old tapes here. Not sure how I'd rate the condition, as I have nothing to compare them to. It's possible the birthday tape has a little mould (I saw white stuff on the side of the tape through the transparent plastic while it was wound on the spool) but nothing major is obvious when watching playback.

Since my wedding tape only dropped 2 frames I am very happy with that. As for the birthday video... I will capture that with lossless HuffyUV as you say and report back! With the capture I already have though, I don't actually notice any stuttering and the sync stays great even by the end of the 40 minutes. So I'm not sure if I can really get a much better result than I already have...

[Sharc]

With the capture I already have though, I don't actually notice any stuttering .....

Hard to believe with 1432 dropped and 1436 inserted frames out of 57603 captured frames. You would have to look carefully for duplicates, causing a slight temporary stutter for each dropped frame for scenes with motion. Step through the frames where these drops/inserts happened. Don't you see any duplicates, means a frame being repeated?
You have no AV sync issue because each dropped frame got substituded (compensated) by an inserted (=duplicated) frame which keeps AV in sync, but creates a slight stutter. You may not experience it as annoying though - e.g. when the drops happened in scenes with little motion -, so you may want to live with it.

What does Vdub show when you open the captured file and select in the Menu Go -> Next drop frame ( or press Shift ^)?

[Alwyn]

It's possible the birthday tape has a little mould (I saw white stuff on the side of the tape through the transparent plastic while it was wound on the spool) but nothing major is obvious when watching playback.

I wouldn't be running that tape through your good VCR; the mould could clog up the heads, not to mention it can be nasty stuff, health-wise. Better get it cleaned or clean it yourself; a number of YT videos show how.

[WhiteboyUltima]

With the capture I already have though, I don't actually notice any stuttering .....

Hard to believe with 1432 dropped and 1436 inserted frames out of 57603 captured frames. You would have to look carefully for duplicates, causing a slight temporary stutter for each dropped frame for scenes with motion. Step through the frames where these drops/inserts happened. Don't you see any duplicates, means a frame being repeated?
You have no AV sync issue because each dropped frame got substituded (compensated) by an inserted (=duplicated) frame which keeps AV in sync, but creates a slight stutter. You may not experience it as annoying though, so you may want to live with it.

What does Vdub show when you select in the Menu Go -> Next drop frame ( or press Shift ^)?

I have just recaptured it with all the same settings but this time with HuffyUV on, with default options for it (YUV). The result shows it was compressed at 2:6:1 but I have no idea how to change that (referring to the fact you told me to do it at YUV 4:2:2). Does this setting really matter? Unsure what it does.

I also had the default settings on in Video > Capture pin... under the Compression section (see pic). Is 0.500 quality correct? That was the default. Not sure if that setting here affects the HuffyUV compression.


[Attachment 90120 - Click to enlarge]

Anyway, that aside. This time there was a LOT less dropped/inserted frames - roughly half as many as my uncompressed capture - but why? Is it just a result of using compression? There's 719 dropped and 722 inserted (see pic). For this capture though, I watched the live status the whole time and I noticed they all occurred only at ONE part of the video (between 18min and 20min).


[Attachment 90123 - Click to enlarge]

That part of the tape could be the problem then - and perhaps that's the mouldy part but it's hard to tell (see pic) - some of those marks are not on the tape but the plastic transparent part. But why are there so much less inserted/dropped frames this time? Is it all down to the HuffyUV compression?


[Attachment 90122 - Click to enlarge]

This is where it gets interesting...
At this point, I decided to open my AVI captures in VDub to step through the dropped frames for this latest capture, and my previous capture which had a lot more dropped frames. (I had no idea you could even do this; does VDub save dropped frames somewhere? How is it playing these dropped frames if they aren't stored in the video file itself... and if it saved them why didn't it just add them to the video during capture... so many questions).

Anyway, stepping through showed something really interesting. The video I just captured using HuffyUV has its 719 dropped frames all happen in ONE section of the tape: between 18min:00s and 20min:15s. BUT when I stepped through the previous capture which had no compression and 1432 dropped/1436 inserted, all of these happened at TWO completely DIFFERENT points in the video for several minutes each - neither of which were the same part of the video as my latest capture so there is no overlap.

To further verify this, I opened my oldest capture of this tape in VDub (on my previous Sanyo VCR with composite RCA, not S-Video) which had HuffyUV and just 242 dropped frames. And this time, the dropped frames were at multiple parts of the video, in totally different sections again from my 2 most recent captures.

So that leads me to think it's probably NOT mould causing this as how could the mould 'move' to totally different (and 15 mins far apart) sections of the tape on my previous capture, so just a single section roughly in the middle of those two sections in my latest capture. Also, it was great that using HuffyUV resulted in less dropped/inserted frames, but why were all those dropped/inserted frames in a completely different part of the video compared to my last capture... and different again in my first capture on the Sanyo?

To summarise, I have no idea why I'm getting dropped frames at completely different parts of the tape with each capture. Turning HuffyUV compression on did help but there's still a lot of dropped/inserted frames. Can anyone speak to this? Is Windows 11 just being demanding at different times? I'm maximising my CPU power as much as I can, closing background apps, telling VDub to use max CPU power, and not viewing the video preview during capture... not sure what else I can do. I've got Options > Performance set to the defaults (see pic below) is it ok?


[Attachment 90124 - Click to enlarge]

And are my capture timing settings ok?


[Attachment 90125 - Click to enlarge]


TBH I'm actually pretty happy to keep this latest HuffyUV capture with the 719 dropped frames, seeing as it was at a section of the video that wasn't too important and to my eye, I can't actually notice much stuttering when I play the AVI files normally or when I view the VHS on my TV - I have to really try hard to see it, to the point where I'm guessing/imagining sometimes. Maybe I'm just used to low PAL frame rates, heh.

Maybe there's some way I can splice in the footage that didn't have dropped frames from my previous capture, into the one section that did have dropped frames in my latest capture, but seeing as one was uncompressed and the other one is, I have no idea if that would work well (plus it sounds fiddly to get just right).

[Sharc]

I have just recaptured it with all the same settings but this time with HuffyUV on, with default options for it (YUV). The result shows it was compressed at 2:6:1 but I have no idea how to change that (referring to the fact you told me to do it at YUV 4:2:2).

That's ok. It's the typical compression by Huffyuv, 4:2:2, only slightly depending on the source content. Nothing to adjust.

Anyway, that aside. This time there was a LOT less dropped/inserted frames - roughly half as many as my uncompressed capture - but why?

I have explained this before: Lower data transfer speed (roughly 40% by the huffyuv compression) to the storage device which may be a bottleneck causing extra drops.

I have no idea why I'm getting dropped frames at completely different parts of the tape with each capture.

Several runs and spooling the "dirty" tape backwards and forwards may shift the mud to new positions on the tape and spread and deposit it on different parts of your VCR, so every capture will be different - but still poor.
Very bad practice of "cleaning" a tape btw., as Alwyn has pointed out before.

TBH I'm actually pretty happy to keep this latest HuffyUV capture with the 719 dropped frames,.....

Which is what really matters at the end ....