VHS digitising

Forums › Home Theatre (including HTPC and EPG Collector) › VHS digitising

Yorkshirekid

193 posts

Master Geek

#154691 4-Nov-2014 16:43

I’m looking to start the process of digitising my VHS tapes. What’s the best way please?

1 Is a video capture card better than any ‘other hardware’?

2 If ‘other hardware’ is better, then what would this be ?

3 How to retain the best possible quality Sound and Visual off the tapes ?

4 My VHS player does not have S-Video ports. Is it better to have one that does ? If so, I'll borrow one.

5 capture to external or local ?

6 SSD or SATA ?

I want to be free to edit the video myself (and I have lots), so I don’t want to outsource and I don’t want to copy to DVD. I found a 2012 thread on this topic that isn’t that enlightening and besides, we are talking two years of technology change here…so, advice would be really welcomed.

Cheers all

wellygary

8312 posts

Uber Geek

#1168657 4-Nov-2014 17:09

What sort of Volume of Tapes are you looking at?

"and I don’t want to copy to DVD"
- getting to DVD is a actually a good Halfway house ( especially if you have a easy way to do it, such as a DVD recorder and tape player combined) as it is then in a Digital format, meaning you can grab the data in a non-linear time,

In terms of a video captrure card " other hardware" is usually a USB tuner stick or similar, for VHS quality it will make little differnece what you use to take Analog RF and convert it to digital- you can then use something like Handbrake to put it into a format your editing software can work with...

Are they regular VHS with mono Audio, or are they Stereo, S-Video is better than regular RF,but you need a Decoder card that can take a S-video input ( which is fairly rare)

IT doesn;t matter what you store them on SSD or SATA, you will not be maxing out the transfer rates

While its 2 years since 2012, the tech has not really changed, becuase what you get out is based on what you put in, VHS source was no problems to encode in 2012 and is still no trouble to do now,

THe only pain is that it has to be done in real time......

Oh, once you do get them all done, make 2 copies, and keep them on seperate drives, it doesn't take much for a drive to fail, the last thing you want is it taking all your work with it....

Yorkshirekid

193 posts

Master Geek

#1168679 4-Nov-2014 17:38

Tapes are 45mins to 3hrs long.
Some stereo, some not.
What is RF?
Can you give me an example of a decoder card please?
Making backup copy - GOOD idea - thanks.

lchiu7

6470 posts

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#1169023 5-Nov-2014 09:06

I used this process to digitise a ton of Hi8 tapes which is really no different to what you're trying to do.

Output the video over s-video and RCA to a Canopus ADV110 Firewire converter which takes analogue video input and outputs DV video over Firewire. I then fed that into a PC via Firewire. The format is lossy but quite low compression

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DV

The resultant files were quite large (several GB/hour) but are easily edited using something like Vegas.

Staying in Wellington. Check out my AirBnB in the Wellington CBD. https://www.airbnb.co.nz/h/wellycbd PM me and mention GZ to get a 15% discount and no AirBnB charges.

JimmyH

2886 posts

Uber Geek

#1169485 5-Nov-2014 18:56

You don't say what type of tapes they are.

If they are old home-recorded tapes with a lot of jitter then connecting a video stabiliser between the VCR and the capture device might be a good idea as it could give a considerably cleaner signal to capture.

If they are commercial tapes that have copy protection on them (ie Macrovision or CGMS/A), then many capture devices will refuse to capture. In which case you will need to make sure you have the correct hardware. Forum rules probably prohibit me from posting detailed instructions, so I will err on the side of caution, but Google is your friend.

Yorkshirekid

193 posts

Master Geek

#1170168 6-Nov-2014 16:26

I know GIMfriend and that's why I'm here- - YOU geeks are friendlier as you've been there-done-that.

No, these are all home tapes, I promise. Who the heck would want to copy a commercial VHS movie these days? (don't answer that) !

The most important thing I've learnt here is that I need something like a digital video converter. I didn't know that and I can see a bunch on Tme. I also need to borrow a VHS player with s-video out (as mine does not have this).
I have a couple of spare 3TB drives in my NAS so I'll save the files there.

So I think I'll go this way, unless anyone can improve on this method.

Thanks all - it's just awesome that you share.

:-)

lchiu7

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#1170340 6-Nov-2014 21:17

You probably don't need a VHS machine with s-video output unless you have Super VHS tapes. Otherwise there is no benefit really and composite video would be fine. About the only potential benefit is that SuperVHS decks tended to have better transports and they might handle your old tapes better.

Staying in Wellington. Check out my AirBnB in the Wellington CBD. https://www.airbnb.co.nz/h/wellycbd PM me and mention GZ to get a 15% discount and no AirBnB charges.

B1GGLZ

1961 posts

Uber Geek

#1170361 6-Nov-2014 21:43

I copied my old tapes using the composite video input on my Hauppage HVR2200 Tuner card connected to an old (1991 vintage) Mitsubishi Nicam Stereo VCR. Worked fine. For editing I use VideoReDo. These days modern cameras use SD Cards and connect to PC via USB making things so much easier. Thank heavens for improving technology.

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BTR

1527 posts

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#1170529 7-Nov-2014 09:33

I recently purchased an Elgato Video Capture, I haven't used it yet to be honest but it looks simple to use and supports PC, Mac and iPad.

https://www.elgato.com/en/video

SepticSceptic

2186 posts

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#1172162 10-Nov-2014 12:28

Watch out for those old tapes - they can clog a video head in seconds flat !!! The glue that holds the magnetic particles to the plastic backing can deteriorate badly.

I read somewhere that giving the VCR tapes a cook to 50deg C (I think ..) prior, and cooling slowly bacjk to room temp allows the binder glue to restick the magnetic particles back into the binding layer, minimising the lossof the particles. May pay to google that one ...

Also tapes can get fungus, and that messes up transfer quality, again clogging the heads.

Give them a fastforward and rewind thru the VCR first to loosen up the tape to enusre the tapes haven't stuck together.

Make sure the VCR heads are clean by running a tape cleaner thru, before each tape.

I used to use a Video capture card to do all this, but in the end it was easier to record directly to a DVD-Recorder, and then copy the resulting DVD files into a video editor. I use Nero video tools, and that can clean up a fair bit - horizontal tearing, noise, etc.

richms

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#1172239 10-Nov-2014 14:44

I found capturing some with a panasonic VHS/DVD combo that even with it on the highest quality setting, there was still massive pixelation of the images compared to capturing it uncompressed to a PC and then letting premiere do the encoding for me.

It is still interlaced on the DVD so you need additional processing before it is viewable on a PC without looking aweful. If you direclty upload to youtube from the DVD it will be horrible.

Richard rich.ms