I want my data back.

[James]

Linus tries to backup some embarrassing VHS tapes from his childhood with the help of Mark's VCR.

 

 

 

[BiLKiNiS]

well young Linus french is far more understandable than current Linus

[Needfuldoer]

Nothing like an SVHS deck with a good time base corrector for digitizing VHS tapes. Honestly if you're reasonably handy with a screwdriver, alcohol, and grease, you can resurrect just about any VCR into working order. Clean the heads, make sure the pinch roller isn't sticky, and grease the moving parts of the tape transport. Depending on how degraded your tapes are, you might have to clean the heads every tape or two as the magnetic stuff sheds off the tape and builds up inside them.

 

Those BlackMagic Analog to SDI throwdown converters are great for the money, too. Another valid option would be to use a frame sync like a Teranex, AJA FS1, or Leitch DPS-475.

 

And since when do we call VCRs "VHS players"?

[Guest]

Oh boy, I can't wait to watch this old family movie....

oh god...

 

 

No...

 

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

[Ritchie89]

in digitizing video its all about a good start I have digitized video professionally for a view year still do it every now and then but its important to start with the best quality you can making something bad good again is really hard

cleaning your tape machines using air and isopropyl alcohol the heads and al the places the tape comes in contact with

when we had really bad tapes, we used to bake them from a day to a week in an oven if I’m not mistaking something like 60 degrees Celsius on some tapes the glue let lose and baking them fixes that

TBC are a must and can also help you get better black levels and chroma colour you can see this using a scope or a virtual scope

and we also used Blackmagic but never the simple ones like the usb ones the tb are probably good but we used pcie cards and always capture uncompressed video for software I just use adobe premier or the software Blackmagic provides so you can do all your corrections to the big files and then export the final product to mpg2 or mp4 if you don’t have the space

 

but the big problem is finding machines especially when you get to the exotic ones

this is the stuff I worked with

[AbydosOne]

The topic of VCR capture is one rabbit-hole I'm glad I didn't chase very far (in retrospect). I have a setup that was mostly free (after I guilted my mom into letting me have their nice VCR by reminding her no one had used it in years); I spent a lot less on the whole thing than one "recommended" VCR would cost, that's for sure. Currently in the process of switching over to OBS for recording just to see if it works any better than the OEM (Hauppauge) software.

 

Here's my wishlist items:

• a VCR that allows for direct reading of the magnetic tape values instead of relying on screen capturing (a la RAW photos, so you can tweak with the base signal gain/tonemapping/etc). Also, be able to rip at >1x speed (the time sink is probably what slows me down the most).
• a software-based TBC, either with or without the above (at least something that can detect each scanline and try to align them vertically; I have issues with tapes having a slight skew (that I can't tell if it's from recording or playback)).

[MultiGamerClub]

Think i have VHS tapes from the 2000's still laying around.. Wouldnt be suprised if we have VCR to.

[StevenNotStephen]

The most surprising part was the FRENCH!

[Red :)]

(4:12) Fun fact: The sample footage for the TBC demonstration is pulled from the Czech version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

[Distinctly Average]

1 hour ago, James said:

Linus tries to backup some embarrassing VHS tapes from his childhood with the help of Mark's VCR.

 

 

I paid my way through university repairing TVs and Videos. I used to buy broken, uncollected VCRs and portable TVs from a few local repair shops for £10 each, repair them and flog them to students for £40 each. In most cases repairs were easy as the shop had already done it as part of the fault finding. When a customer said it was going to be too expensive the repair shops standard thing at the time was to just clip a component one end so if the customer collected it the same fault would exist. Most repair shops also put their own shops address label inside. So if the customer didn’t leave it and took it to another shop, the next shop would know and contact the first so the customer got the same price quote. It was all a bit iffy. If customers just to,d the shop to scrap it, that is where I came in offering as “Disposal service”, which is what the law said at the time. This way the shop recovered a little of their costs and got a disposal receipt without having to pay for an actual disposal service.

 

As for copying old tapes. The home user can still get, at least here in the UK, combination VCR-CD writer units. They became quite common towards the end of VHS. There were also a few VCR/PVR combo machines so you could copy to HDD but these were less common. For the home user this can be an easy method of archiving old tapes. Just for anyone trying this please test your old VCR with a disposable tape first. Many old VCRs had an idler wheel and as the rubber wore or just aged your prize tapes could easily be swallowed as the head and load mech sucks in the tape but the take up wheel does not turn. So when you try and eject some of the tape remains around the drum and posts.

[lansing]

For anyone who are interested, there is a lossless way now to digitize VHS by capturing the RF signal directly from the VCR. Once the signal was capture, you can apply filters like TBC or whatever and convert them into picture and sound.

 

vhs-decode

 

 

For traditional capturing setup, you don't really need those crazily expensive line based TBC VCR or standalone TBC that are in the thousands. For playback, you'll only need a solid deck with the option to turn off the auto sharpener/denoiser "features". For TBC, a popular alternative is to use the Panasonic ES10 dvd recorder as a passthrough. Another option is to use one of those digital mixers that were produced in the late 90 early 2000, they had TBC baked in along with the ability to bypass macrovision.

[dsmanneke]

Wait a minute, you can't deinterlace with Gigapixel AI, this is only for regular photos. 

That's why you need a program more like Topaz Video Enhance AI or VirtualDub2.

I recommend VirtualDub2 because it has more options and algorithms to do this. 

 

[Eric the Grey]

This brings back memories.  

 

I decided to do a similar project but opted to pay someone with the equipment and knowledge to do it for me, the main reason is that what I was having digitized were some of my father's old 8mm tape he filmed back when we were young kids (59 last month), and some even before I was born.

 

Unfortunately, not much of it could be salvaged, but I did get some scenes from a lake (I have no idea which one) and one particularly memorable Christmas from when I was like 8 or 9. It was wonderful to see and share with my sisters.

 

Luckily, I don't have to do this with VHS tapes, as all the ones I have were either purchased (tv shows, or movies) or recorded off live TV.  I have no need to digitize those.

 

 

 Eric the Grey

[GameRetro]

This was a great video.

 

I can't find the link in the description so sharing it here myself - shoutout to DIGITALFAQ forums, I immediately recognized the VCR buying guide they have which has EVERYTHING you need to know about which players have what you need to get the best possible shot at archiving your tapes:

 

https://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/video-restore/1567-vcr-buying-guide.html

 

Have personally gone over this post a couple dozen times and it's always a good thing to have it bookmarked in case you run into a sale of a VCR/VHS Player.

[kuchikirukia]

Did you deinterlace to 60fps?  Nearly everybody gets that wrong.  NTSC is 60i, which properly deinterlaces to 60fps, not 30.

 

In avisynth it's just 

QTGMC()

or 

yadifmod2(mode=1)

 

QTGMC is better for SD since the neural net interpolation helps put things back together.  I prefer YADIF for interlaced Blu-rays.  It's a more natural look.

[Rumpel]

For the blackmagic design analog to sdi, what kind of adapters are needed for the regular composite (red white yellow) outputs?

[l3g4to]

mhhh.... kind of a how-to would be nice since i have some vhs tapes left to digitalize...

well... lets search the internet what would be a best bang for the buck

[trickfilm400]

Hi y'all,

maybe some of you have some idea to fixing my issues:

 

My goal is so digitalize multiple tapes, like VHS, S-VHS, Video8, Hi8 and these formats: so i got this BlackmagicDesign setup.

The issue is now that with some players I don't get any input for the capture due to the analog to SDI converter because of the TBC (I assume, because one VHS player has a TBC switch and this is working)

 

The issue with the TBC is already in the Blackmagic Forum multiple times like there: https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=154851

Like in the forum post: I get the flickering SDI output LED effect, where the adapter doesn't output to SDI and the indicator LED is just blinking all the time (but with the working TBC recorder this issue is gone, but twith the Video8 recorder this issue is always, no matter what I try: I tried S-Video, Video (RCA), also in combination with these scart adapters but the TBC issue is always there)

 

So how can I capture for example a video8 tape with Blackmagic? The player doesn't seem to have any kind of TBC (or I don't know how I can setup it) and other capture cards are working just fine, but the quality of these capture cards is not always the best

 

Would be nice if someone has any idea on how to fix this issue(if my post was understandable) :)

Greetings

[LetsTalkAboatThis]

Does anybody know how they got the audio into OBS???

I'm using the same set up (VCR with S Video to the same Black Magic devices via SDI, into a Mac Mini. I get video, but no audio.

I have a HOSA (RCA to 1/4 audio jack) cable from the VCR into the Black Magic Analog to Digital inputs, just like this video, but the Ultra 3G Recorder doesn't carry audio, does it?

How can I get some audio into my Mac Mini that's running OBS?

[Hiddemans23]

So.. I have a vcr composite to a scart to HDMI converter set to 720p. Recording VHS
What are the best settings for OBS?