The Best Way to Capture Analog Video (it's kinda weird)

I bought the upscaler and a USB capture device. Unfortunately, when I play an analogue video signal from tape, the picture jumps around left and right like crazy, it is unwatchable. But when I have a direct hook-up from the camcorder, picture is perfectly stable. There is no copy-protection, they were my own recorded tapes, VHS and Hi8. What could be the reason? Could it be, because it is PAL?

Michal Szabó

Great video! I'd be curious to know what the Internet Archive are using to capture the 70,000 VHS tapes of Marion Stokes https://blog.archive.org/2019/05/24/71716-video-tapes-in-12094-days/

Mick Carroll

I had exactly the same issues and used the same solution. Was it Pinnacle by any chance?

What are all those pixels all over your t-shirt....?

Gavin Rea-Davies

You don't change the output resolution of your premiere project? We can't be friends.

Asaf Sagi

I used this same setup last year to covert my boss's old home videos for a big anniversary project he was doing. I had 2 Avermedia game capture vices from another project for him to rerecord his kids' sports games off cable TV DVRs. When I got a pile of VHS and HI8 tapes to convert, those game capture devices were the only things I had for this, so I got a cheap composite and s-video to HDMI adapter. The s-video output from the VCR looked a little better than the composite.

Kadah

I got a pretty old but decent video digitizer with TV tuner, for capturing live TV it worked perfectly, but video recordings seems a bit more difficult, because of the more unstable time base... I'm not sure if my VCR or the old tape is actually the worst problem there. But I might give this a try, thanks for the explanation Alec!

MrHammond

I had to converted Super 8mm film to digital format and just recorded the footage projected onto an A4 sheet of paper with a video camera. The results were not too bad. Sometimes the rough methods are the best. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGmGqTGRJWc

okay... You got me on the audio synchronisation issues. I was only listening and needed to rewind a bit to see you, as expected, were visually not in sync. Well done!

Paul Schuur

I wish I figured this out about a year ago when I converted about 5 home movies... I got one of those crappy usb-composite converter do-das and it sucked. ...and I already had one of those composite->hdmi units (to hook up my VCR to my receiver)!!! ugh... time to re-encode with my son's elgato HD60... doh - coulda had a V8...

Richard Thompson

Analog capture 😂😂

Dick Merritt

Why was there a black line on the side of the captured video?

Ethan Snow

Another fun and cheap option is a Matrox MXO2. You can get one with the matching PCIe card and cable for ~$70 every day of the week and it produces some really good results. I don't like it as much as the Black Magic Declink HD Extreme I have, but I had to build my own cable for the BMD card. Here's a sample of a video rip (after Youtube compression!) of a MXO2 rip compared to the other rips on Youtube. The result is a *lot* sharper https://i.imgur.com/NGwT8pP.png

Chris Satterfield (Compgeke)

I noticed that your game video capture has a YPbPr interface. Would it take a component analog video (like many laserdiscs, Beta, and VHD-HD have) and convert it without the necessity of going through the "upscaler" (horrible word)? I have a large library of laserdiscs and a failing player (know any reasonable priced techs that can make the proper adjustments in the Minneapolis area?) so I'd be interested in this.

Mike Bird

Alec, We can be good friends. I get really agitated when I see people watching 4x3 in 16x9 format. Then when you show them true HD, they say the people look tall and skinny because the're used to seeing them short and fat. I also can't stand it when I see some one who has shot video on their smartphone vertically and not horizontally, filling the HD screen. All that wasted picture you're not seeing.

Allen Boogaard

All my old home videos were on 8mm, Digital 8, and MiniDV. I wanted to transfer these before standards became obsolete and equipment fully failed. As the only interface to my cameras was IEEE 1394 (Firewire) my only 1394 card only fit an older desktop running Linux. I was desperately trying to find a batch compression method that could compress the .dv files while maintaining some semblance of quality until I realized that I had multiple unused hard drives around and my entire archive took about 500 GB. I now have 2 copies of my entire uncompressed home video library from 1992 to 2007. How much has actually been viewed? 1% perhaps?

Michael Steeves

Only £395!

kalleboo

Blackmagic H.264 Pro Recorder: Capture from broadcast decks to SD and HD H.264 files https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/uk/products/h264prorecorder

Colin Grimshaw

Morning, Colin! :-)

Stephen Bell

Creative solution! I remember back in the day, outputting and capturing video through a PC video card always looked horrible and would have the weirdest audio sync issues. My solution at the time was using a DV camera (in my case, actually a Digital8), which had much better video hardware, timecode, and looked flawless (...for the time of course)

kalleboo

Hi, Alec, I'd be genuinely interested to know how you think that compares with my Toshiba VHS player/DVD recorder. Having just finished digitising 48 family archive VHS C cassettes to DVD and importing the resulting VOB files into Premiere to make new DVDs, should I start over? (Model D-VR180T.)

Stephen Bell

great work!

Cats n' Cameras

Unfortunately, the ways to get better analog captures either have diminishing returns, where you're only chasing a minor quality improvement, become expensive quickly, or just ends up being a load of minor inconsequential details. With that cheap composite to HDMI upscaler, it's probably doing a more than adequate job for something like VHS captures, but would probably start to show it's faults when trying to capture things like retro consoles outputting composite. Might start to see things like ringing artefacts, or areas where the interpolation on the upscale isn't quite perfect. Not a dealbreaker for your use case, but certainly a factor for anyone chasing a "perfect" capture. What's more of a concern for VHS (but in general equally as minor) would be the outputting to 720p. Upscalers work best when the upscale is an integer multiple of the source resolution, since otherwise a much larger chunk of the pixels will end up as the result of interpolating multiple pixels. Something to look at is line doublers, since they'll avoid interpolating entirely, and just repeat a line. Alternatively, something that will output an acceptable HDMI signal at 480p. As far as the actual capture method, the capture device is unlikely going to be capturing 4:4:4 video so there may be some loss of color accuracy, but given the low color resolution of analog TV anyway, the effects would be incredibly minor at worst. Most PC capture devices will only go up to 4:2:2 (YUY2), and will otherwise be MJPEG, so you probably wouldn't get better for the price anyway. Getting a full 4:4:4 capture from an HDMI signal requires things like portable recorders used in pro video production (e.g. Atomos), or PC gear like Magewell cards/devices, or the higher end AVerMedia devices/cards for gamers. Direct analog capture into a PC, rather than going through an upscaler is most of the time going to be pretty bad unless you have something like a Magewell. Benefit of going direct though, or capturing a 480 HDMI signal that hasn't been deinterlaced, is that you can control how to deinterlace yourself. If you're using OBS to capture from those devices, you have multiple deinterlacing options, as well as letting you pick the decode format on the capture device, so you can be sure you're not getting an MJPEG signal going into your PC. This also means you can record with the absolute best quality, rather than trusting a cheap H.264 encoder chip, it wouldn't be stretched if you set it up right, and you don't have to pull the recordings off of another device.

Love the audio sync part!

Oooo. With that B roll I can make my own video and stand-in for you :-)

Colin Grimshaw