Hi all
I have a load of old VHS videos (cassettes and camera tapes) which I am looking to digitise. Amazingly the old camera and VHS recorder still work and I have an old tuner / video capture card which still works. Anyone had any experience of doing this recently and any recommendations on what software to use and any pitfalls? Recording these at normal speed will take many hours so wanted to get it right from the start ?
Thanks
Lee
Having done this for TV programmes that I had recorded on VHS or for home movies on Hi8 camcorder, I found one problem that I needed to guard against. It may have been a peculiarity of the card and/or software that I was using, but it had a habit of sometimes synchronising with the wrong field of the TV frame, which gave rise to blurry double-image motion if anything (including the camera) moved.
It happened probably about 50% of the time, and it meant that you got the odd field of one TV frame and the even field of the next TV frame in the same frame of the digital MPEG version. If there was movement between the two that meant you got a double image.
So I got into the habit of starting the recording to MPEG a bit early and checking the results as the recording was running. If I detected a "crossfire" I stopped and restarted (and checked again). If it looked OK, I let it continue.
I did my recording on a Windows XP PC, because I happened to acquire one with a TV card and software installed. The results are a lot better than a USB digital converter that I bought, which was liable to give crosshatch patterning on strong colours. I used VideoReDo software (unfortunately it's not free) to edit out any unwanted bits such as continuity announcements, adverts etc.
You're using Linux. I've not come across an equivalent package for Linux (eg Raspbian, Ubuntu). There are some editing programs which claim to allow you to edit out unwanted bits (without recoding everything else which takes ages) but they produce horrible glitches at the edit points because they don't preserve the stream of key frames and intermediate difference frames that MPEG compression makes, which is incredibly naive.
The other thing to be aware of is that some packages can't handle video files that are larger than 4 GB. The one I use on my Windows XP computer is like this. It starts a new file every time the current one grows beyond 4 GB, which is about 90 minutes recording time so it is not uncommon. And there is always a gap of a couple of seconds between the end of one file and the start of the next. The solution is the watch the file growing and stop recording as it is about to exceed 4GB, then wind the tape back a bit and start recording again to a new file (checking for the dreaded "crossfire"!). Join the two recordings together and use VideoReDo to take out the duplicated bit, cutting at a change in shot which can be accurately located in the first and second copy of the video. Of course, if the recording software you use doesn't have this problem, you don't need to faff around doing this ;-)
One final tip. Analogue (eg VHS) recordings contain quite a bit of electronic noise (slight snow on the picture and/or wiggly vertical lines). This does not compress well with MPEG. So even if the recordings you generate are large files compared with what you'd record in an off-air TV programme, don't be tempted to use software to compress the MPEG files to a smaller size which is comparable with a TV recording, because you'll get some horrible compression artefacts. Even the BBC uses a higher bit rate (larger recording files) for broadcasting old analogue programmes from the archives: an hour of (for example) Morecambe and Wise will generate a significantly larger recording file than an hour of a modern programme made and edited on digital equipment rather than PAL videotape.
Thanks very much NY. Which file format would you recommend I use? For video editing on Ubuntu, I have previously used kdenlive which is very good but only on digital files so far. Will let you know how well it works on these files.
Thanks. From what i can see, that will allow you to manipulate the video once it is in a digital format. What I am trying to do is play the video on the normal player and "recrod" it in digital format on my PC via the tuner/ capture card. I have heard VLC will do this but at the moment can't seem to get the video stream to work with it.
I spent months trying to capture video out of a VHS player. Far better to spend money on a VHS and DVD recorder which will in theory allow a cross recording to digital format. these still exist on Ebay under £200 Once you have a digital file in Linux the tools I use are handbrake for correcting aspect ratio and adding metadata, and openshot for removing/splicing sections.
Thanks... The additional challenge I have is that I also have old video camera tapes which can''t be played through a VHS recorder.
Yes and the image sharpening causes problems on the edges of captions too and this can be an issue I'm told. Another thing is that if they are commercial videos the copy protection by Macrovision can be a pain to deal with. This causes juddering and other effects.
Brian
FWIW, another low cost method without using a PC to capture:
Use a composite to HDMI Video Audio Converter Adapter Upscaler
The Best Easy Way to Capture Analog Video (it's a little weird)
I used to do it by copying from VHS to DVD and then ripping the DVD on a PC, but I realise that there aren't many DVD recorders around that can take a SCART (or indeed, any) input. (I used to have one.)
I would concentrate on one project at a time.
You would be surprised, how much time it takes to make a quality recording.
Sometimes, you can't even walk away from the equipment while the capture happens. For one tape, I had to manually adjust the heads (with the Up/Down buttons on the VCR) due to a tape cassette mechanical issue, as the tape played.
If Linux has a driver for your video tuner/capture card, it should bring output to a standard interface (like V4L).
This is not the right recipe, and this page shows some approximate pictures to show that VLC has more than movie player capabilities. In Linux, it can even play TV channels off your digital tuner card.
One of the biggest issues with any hardware capture purchase, is the "no software" issue. *Do not* buy hardware, without verifying there is sufficient software to make it work. If there is a common theme on the purchase page customer comment section, it will be "the included software SUCKS". This includes crashing, quality issues (tinted output) and so on. One of the reasons I make a reference to BTTV above (BT848/BT878 capture cards), is those are simple enough in hardware, you can hardly screw it up. But BT878 has four input channels and there are around 30 different card formulations, and the PNP (Plug And Play) is arcane for that subsystem. To do a proper driver for that card type, means encoding at least 30 card detections into your driver.
I used to hang out in a Mac forum. A guy there said "I've written a BT878 driver for Mac, but... I haven't done the 30 card detection part yet". I said great. I got the binary from him, and of course the default config it was using was wrong. There was snow on the screen. But, because this was the old MacOS (like 9.04), you could do Peek and Poke of memory locations. You could still access hardware addresses in those days. And using the datasheet, I found the register for the multiplexer selection. And... was rewarded with a TV picture on my Mac, using a WinTV card :-) Ah, the good old days, when the user "was in control" :-) Like a car with a manual choke control.
*******For camcorder tapes, some camcorders have a Firewire output. And a lot of PCs in the last decade or two, have a VIA Firewire chip on them.
Run the camera off the battery during playback. You don't want any potential issues with grounding.
For Firewire capture, you start the capture software first, then click the Play button on the camcorder. The applicable standards number, is 61883, and you sometimes see that mentioned in driver notes. Firewire supports multiple protocols. It has a networking protocol (a protocol removed from modern Windows). But it also has some storage standard (whose name I've forgotten), plus the camcorder capture via 61883 stack.
They've stopped putting Firewire connectors on new PCs, so don't throw away all your old PCs until the camcorder videos are transferred. Otherwise, two capture cards, a tuner with a DIN connector for analog, and an HDMI capture card for HDMI cases, should cover it. HDMI capture is one of the things I don't own, and I haven't played with one. I think my point and shoot video camera, has an HDMI out on it, if I needed a stimulus for test.
My newest computer motherboard has no PCI slot, which means I can't fit a BT878 card, nor could the machine have a Firewire chip (as the Firewire chips are PCI generation devices and if the machine has no PCI slot, it also can't be doing onboard PCI either). Tape conversion projects should have been started around ten years ago, as back then you could still pick up useful items at that time. Now, it's harder, and especially hard if you're one of those people who throw away all the old PCs.
Paul
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