Urgent (ish) VHS to digital transfer central london or Tunbridge Wells

Does he have a VHS/S-VHS player?

If so, buy one of these for delivery tomorrow ...

I prefer companies that show a street address right in the advert. That's to avoid companies that simply mail your tape off "somewhere" for conversion.

vhs digitizer service london uk

To play a VHS tape, you need "tracking". I've had cassettes, where the picture would roll a bit, and it seemed something in the cassette was not running true, and this made it difficult to capture the first two minutes of the tape. Later sections were OK. It might mean that what was written, was written badly on the tape. I've had other tapes, on the same recorder, play OK.

Even a WinTV card can capture a VHS tape, but then you need the cable with the connectors on it, to connect to the VCR. My WinTV card has been back in the box for a few years, and I have my doubts I'd be able to figure out the software end well enough to get it going in a hurry. VLC is a great tool for experiments, but... a deliver by Thursday is going to be hard to meet.

And it is VHS, so the quality is going to be suspect, no matter how much you play with it. But at least with a shop, they will have a somewhat better machine than the one at home.

Another way to do this is:

I used to play DVDs on a set top box, transmit on channel 3 and connect to the TV set, and the hardware chain would correct DC restoration problems. The picture didn't look half bad, considering.

Maybe you could take baseband out of the VCR, and send it to some interface on your home kit, same idea. Some boxen have the hydra cable on them, for baseband input of one sort or another.

But a Thursday delivery mixed with "project involves video", that's just too tight. A typical budget for "home video project" is two weeks. That's what it takes, the many tries to do it right. In terms of "Garbage In Garbage Out", the reason it takes two weeks, is the state of the original recording. I did some "sharpening" experiments to fix up one tape.

Always record a short segment (two minutes worth), to prove out your software plumbing. I'm all the time forgetting this and pumping two hour videos into some program for nothing. Short test segments, save a lot of time, when getting the plumbing aligned.

Paul

Turn around time is currently 10 working days A 24 hour service is available at 50% extra You can have DVDs or editable computer files

Theo

Most likely a machine with poor tension control has played that section and stretched it slightly. Recording tape stretches easily, and also expands and contracts with temperature and humidity. It's awful stuff really. A professional machine with timebase correction would be able to handle dodgy tapes better than a domestic machine would.

The recorded tracks are almost parallel to the tape, so any stretching will alter the angle of the track relative to the head path of the transport, and a tracking control could get it right at the top or bottom of the picture, but not both at the same time.

When helical scan was first used for broadcast, the replay head was mounted on a complex ceramic device which actually moved the head up and down slightly to follow the recorded track while keeping the head face parallel to the tape. I don't think anything smaller than a fifty grand one-inch broadcast machine ever had anything like that.

Not as awful as generally thought. I posted here over 7 months ago about a bit of fun I'd had with a couple of old SVHS recorders I'd retrieved from the loft, and hadn't been used for at least 15 years. I tried a couple of old SVHS tapes recorded in 1992 in them. Quote: "I doubt that either VCR had been used for at least 15 years, so it's remarkable that the mechanics worked without problem. And it says a lot for longevity of analogue tape recording that both tapes I tried were fine (the one I had a problem with in the Ferguson seemed to be ok with the JVC). It was interesting to read the news on the Teletext recorded with both tapes, as SVHS could record it without problem."

I didn't try a non-SVHS tape. Perhaps that would have been worse. However, my experience is that 30+ years old tape will play back without problem. I wonder if a DVD-R or DVD-RAM of similar age and storage would do as well.

I was pleasantly surprised when I came to play, and copy to MPG file, a

That machine claims to have auto-tracking, but there is a manual adjustment that you can make if auto-tracking fails. I was lucky that I never encountered a tape where I couldn't shift the noise bar off the screen.

My experience of USB video digitisers is that the quality is very dodgy with VHS tapes, as opposed to other composite video sources such as a Sky box or a PVR. They are probably rather intolerant of borderline-spec PAL signals with VHS tape timing jitter.

I bought one and got horrendous shimmering and tearing of the picture on certain colours, and a lot of PAL dot patterning on colours. Its only advantage is that it was happy to play a copy-protected commercial tape of a film which was not available on DVD: I squared it with my conscience by saying "I own a VHS copy so I've paid once, and I will not be giving/selling that tape to anyone after I've made a digital copy, and I've even tried to buy a DVD and found it was never released on DVD."

I've had much better quality results with an old PC that I acquired which has a PCI card for video digitising. The PC has Windows XP, so being cautious I don't connect it to my network, and I use a USB stick to copy off any recordings that I make from analogue sources. The only problem with the recording software on the PC is that it splits the recording into 4 GB chunks and if you join those chunks together, there's a couple of seconds missing. So I record so as to produce a file that is just under 4 GB (about an hour of video), wind the tape back a bit and start recording again - and then join the recordings in VideoReDo to get a seamless join, looking for the same shot-change on both recordings as the marker for the cut-point. To quote Eric Morecambe, "you can't see the join" ;-)

A DVD-R, if it's made of the right stuff.

There are not quite as many suppliers of media now, as there once were.

I think write-once DVDs last a lot longer than erasable re-write discs. Something to do with the different technology for storing the pattern of pits on the tracks.

So always save things to DVD-R rather than DVD-RW if you plan to keep them.

I had a DVD-RW that I used for making weekly backups of my PC. I kept it in my car, to avoid the all-the-eggs-in-one-basket problem of losing the backup if the house burnt down. So it was kept in a very wide range of temperatures. OK, any given recording was refreshed every week, but the disc survived in a range of temperatures and with over a hundred erase/rewrite cycles.

I think the oldest DVD-R that I have is about 15 years old and that plays fine having been kept in a case on a shelf at room temperature.

What is the oldest professional-format videotape that is still playable (assuming there are still players that will play it)? Apparently some tape in archives are in formats (*) for which the world's stock of remaining video heads is insufficient to play all the material for copying to a digital format, which is a bummer :-( Not sure why no more heads can be manufactured if the price is right...

(*) Maybe quadruplex 2" which predates the more modern helical-scan 1" formats. Because the head drum of a quad machine rotates at a silly speed of (IIRC) 15,000 rpm, the heads wear out after a relatively short amount of playing. 15,000 rpm is f-ing fast, when you think that electric drills usually have an upper limit of about 3000-4000 rpm.

actually the problem was with the playback not the recording. And, indeed, my SVHS played back teletext, too.

The National Film archive has a number of old machines for that purpose. I know they bought a C-format Hitachi HR-210 in about 1984, though I don't know if they have been able to maintain it.

Of course they can. Though it might require the manufacture of the machine that can manufacture the heads...

Indeed so. The head wheel had a compressed air bearing with around 0.1 thou clearance, and the tape where the head wheel moved was sucked by vacuum into a shape matching the head track, to maximise head to tape contact. The position of the vacuum guide could be adjusted in all three dimensions to get the best tracking, which was necessary for tape interchange. All tapes would play back best on the machine which had recorded them, but that was usually not possible.

The quads needed both compressed air and vacuum to function, though the pumps could be built in if the machine wasn't used in an area with several others and a central supply of both. The quads and C-formats generally also used compressed air to lubricate the tape guides to reduce wear.

The instant-start AVR-1 used tape sucked by vacuum into buffer columns on both sides of the head wheel, as the reels couldn't get up to speed quickly enough. A certain BBC sports presenter couldn't work to the normal ten-second countdown, so had the have the use of one of these hideously expensive machines.

That hints at an AVI container for output. The older software used to do things like that.

The problem with the AVI extension, is it did not seem to contain enough information to write across-industry standard formats. If someone had made a reference implementation of AVI2 OpenDML, things might have worked out better. You may find, if saving to AVI2, that something weird happens if you try to rewind back past the 4GB mark.

There are other containers, that don't have that sort of funny behavior.

Paul

So was it mainly tape transport (starting the supply and take-up spools running) which required the 10 second lead time? I wasn't sure how long it took the heads to lock to the video tracks once the tape was moving at full speed. Presumably the tape that was in the buffer column had to be started moving by moving a pinch wheel against a capstan, accelerating it from rest to 7.5 or 15 inches per second. 200 msec cue delay is bloody fast.

What was the head-to-tape gap?

Things moved on *tremendously* by the time VHS and other domestic formats came along, that they were able to *de-skill* things enough that manual tweaks were not normally necessary and servos/sensors/logic was sufficient.

VHS could cope with *minor* tape creases with resultant oxide shedding, and a lint-free cloth and a bit of IPA (no, *not* the beer!) would un-clog the heads. BTDTGTTS. I usually found that if my VHS heads got clogged, restoring a good picture was *relatively* easy, but getting the hifi sound working (additional heads on the same drum) was a nightmare.

Did professional helical scan VTRs generally need much less hand-holding to get decent results than Quad? Did they always record one complete field along the length of a track, like VHS, or were there any formats that segmented a picture like quad did? One revolution or one half-revolution per field is 50 or 25 revs/sec (3000 or 1500 rpm) which is a bit less than Quad's 15,000!

I have just copied (to ISO using ImgBurn) 59 DVDs (DVD-R) from the front of magazines, dating from 2006 - 2010, to send to an archive. Of those the first six had surface degradation & failed to copy all the files. I can't remember how, or where, the DVDs were stored originally but they were always in their cases & out of bright sunlight. It may be that the magazine had different batches of DVDs or different suppliers so that the later DVDs were more reliable. I didn't take note of any of the media information available from Imgburn. It doesn't really matter as all the indexes were intact & the missing files were available on other DVDs.

There were a lot of factors, but since it took so long to get the tape reels up to speed, there wasn't a lot of urgency in improving other matters. As I recall, a typical quad took three or four seconds to full lock, with the ten seconds allowed for problems. Once the decision was made to buffer the tape transport, a lot of other matters were addressed to get servo and electronic delays down.

No pinch roller, a vacuum capstan, and it was much slower for PAL with its 8-field sequence, around 350ms.

I never saw one, but the MD of Shibaden UK (later Hitachi) saw a prototype car-boot-sized quad. I think there were licensing problems with Ampex, so it was never produced. Later, Hitachi produced a C format machine that could be carried in one hand (for a short distance), unfortunately at around the same time that Kudelski made the Ampex/Nagra VPR-5.

No idea, I was never involved with the quads, but the central air supply at TV Centre certainly had large filters.

No idea, but not a lot, as frequencies up to about 10MHz were involved. The heads were coupled to the non-moving parts by rotary transformer.

Definitely. The quads needed a competent video engineer to look after them and align them before use, The B and C format machines needed a knowledgeable operator, but no alignment to achieve tape compatibility.

The A and C formats used a single track per field, and used a complete revolution of the drum, so only one head and what was called the omega wrap. One guide moved away from the drum for tape loading, and in use the tape very nearly touched itself. U-matic, VHS, Betamax and Betacam used two heads and half a revolution per field.

There were professional helical machines long before the broadcast ones, using colour-under like the U-matic and domestic machines. The A format was a one-inch professional helical, used where better quality than U-matic was needed. B and C format machines used direct colour recording of PAL or NTSC, thus removing the biggest single quality limitation of colour-under machines.

The B format was the broadcast-quality Bosch BCN, a segmented-scan helical one-inch using six segments per field for PAL. Bosch found it difficult to sell into the US against the dominant Ampex, and bought Telemation inc from Bell and Howell for easier access to the market. The BCN, like the quad, needed a frame store for slow and still replay, while the C format machines with the moveable heads could get away with just a timebase corrector.

Another segmented helical was the earlier IVC 9000, also broadcast standard but using two-inch tape. It was cheaper than the quads, but of course not compatible with them.

I presume if they were mass-produced DVDs that accompanied magazines, they weren't strictly speaking DVD-R which is a blank disk that is capable of being written to (once) by a DVD writer in a PC.

Apparently mass-produced CDs and DVDs are produced by stamping a smooth metal-foil blank with a master and the applying a protective clear plastic coating, in a similar way that vinyl records are stamped. When I first read that, I thought it sounded like an April Fool, because the thought of mechanically stamping tracks to make troughs from corresponding proud bits on the master, when the tracks are so close together sounded utterly preposterous.

Track pitches are:

I've never heard of a vacuum capstan. I've found references to (audio) tape recorders with *no* capstan, relying on very precise control of take up spool speed (varying as the reel fills up, presumably!) and a vague reference with Quad that air pressure pushes the tape against a capstan spindle as if a pinch wheel had been used, but is sounds somewhat akin to magic! most intriguing...

That bloody 8-field PAL sequence... It must have caused creative problems with editors not being to edit to finer precision - when more use was made of editing later on when dramas were starting to be shot single-camera rather than mostly being recorded as-live. I'll have to look at why it was as large as 8 fields: I realise that the alternating phase means that it will be double NTSC, but I forget why NTSC can't be edited to 2-field (1 frame) accuracy.

Mind you, the concept of cut-tape editing Quad, getting joints lined up sufficiently accurately, blows my mind. I realise it was done with a microscope, viewing the control track that have been made visible with a solution of what was effectively iron filings, but to be able to make a physical joint that didn't move as the splicing tape was being added, is incredible. But it allowed for very fast editing to create compilation tapes of sports events - I gather that it was used for sport long after everything else had gone over to helical 1" formats, for that very reason.

Presumably once a tape had been cut and spliced, it could never be bulk-erased or erased in such a way that the control track was rewritten in a different place, because there must never be a possibility of a video head hitting a splice - normally the splices would have been between head passes, at frame boundaries.

Yes, it's got "Nagra" stamped all over the design of it!

I remember at university (I did electronics) we once used a Nagra audio tape recorder for something. I was the one who worked out how to get the tape to move - there was a "clutch" control that engaged the tape transport: it wasn't as simple as pressing the Play button.

I've seen Youtube videos that demonstrate the line-up of a Quad, and all the picture artefcats

Ah yes, I've seen a diagram of omega wrap. It hadn't occurred to me that it would allow one head rather than two.

I hadn't realised that U-matic was colour-under like VHS etc.

I remember doing a summer job at a well-known defence company which essentially involved feeding a U-matic with cassettes that contained videos that needed certain sections digitising, The procedure was to copy part of the tape to a slow-motion sports recorder (each segment was only about 20 seconds long) which could then be advanced frame by frame under control of a computer that digitised each frame, taking a second of so per frame (so a long way short of real-time!).

I think U-matic is what Frankie the video recordist had to lug around as he was tethered to Graham the cameraman on Treasure Hunt. I was always amazed how rugged it was - it was rare to see a video dropout from the VCR getting jogged as they were running or getting in/out of the helicopter.

I remember reading of developments in VTRs which allowed them to be use for stop-motion animation, saving a few seconds of video to some sort of frame store (maybe a slo-mo) and then squirting it out to VTR and thus making essentially a lot of assembly edits. Not sure what format was used.

The idea of being able to move the heads on a VTR so they still followed the tracks when the tape was stationary or moving slowly was brilliant. How did domestic formats do still frame? Was that similar technology or did the drum shaft swing slightly on its axis to change the tracking angle? They certainly had passable still frames and slow speed play on VHS by the early

The very first VCR I ever encountered was the Philips N1500 which used a square cassette that had the spools one on top of the other like a Super 8 film cartridge. I was in the sixth form at school and when I was made a prefect, my "posting" was to the school audio visual room (I avoided having to break up playground fights or keep discipline in the dinner queue!) - a really cushy number. So I got to play with someone else's expensive toys! I was in my element! The school had just got a couple of top-loader VHS machines, but they still had the old N1500 which was occasionally needed if a teacher requested a programme from some time ago which had been recorded on that format. The picture quality of that was *bad* :-( Most embarrassing was to come across a tape that had been recorded a couple of years earlier of my class improvising a role-playing thing in French - atrocious accents and outrageous hamming-up. I played the part of a woman who had killed an attacker - "Je pensais qu'il allait me tuer. J'étais effrayé. Je l'ai tué en légitime défense." (I thought he was about to kill me. I was was frightened. I killed him in self-defence," imagine how much you can ham-up that line!

The top loader VHS machines with huge piano keys were a PITA compared with "modern" versions: they had to unlace the tape and relace it whenever you went between play and FF/RW, and you had to be very careful to apply even pressure to both sides of the cradle as you were loading a cassette, or else it would jam. I have *fond* memories of demonstrating the VCR to a female teacher who was probably only a couple of years older than me and us both ending up in fits of giggles and "ooh matronnnnnnnnn" comments when I described "press both sides evenly, use your fingertips, nice and gently so it doesn't stick" ;-) OK, I *did* make it sound as suggestive as possible. Happy days...

And now we can record video on a phone or a GoPro, or receive and record TV on a Raspberry Pi and edit out adverts (works a treat for me). Technology is fantastic.

The capstans were quite large, and the vacuum one was covered with perforations:

Don't recall about NTSC. but in PAL the Bruch blanking of the subcarrier burst repeated every eight fields, and had to be synchronised. If it wasn't, the dreaded 'colour flash' occurred at some edit points.

It was indeed, mostly used for Match Of The Day highlights.

Not just editing, tape was expensive enough that damaged tapes were recovered by splicing, with a machine to run through a tape and record bad patches. This is why many early BBC video recordings don't survive, the tape was recycled.

Yes, it was the forerunner of VHS and Beta, just being a larger version of pretty much the same mechanisms. The tape was 3/4", so the quality was a bit better, at least in the later designs.

Yes, it was U-matic, and fairly heavy. They weren't bad for translation, but the high angular momentum of the head drum meant they didn't take kindly to rotation.

I think the trick there was to angle the two heads slightly in opposite directions, and let the tracks overlap slightly, with no space between them. One head was almost blind to the other track so there was little crosstalk. The tape ran fairly slowly, and the change in track angle when stationary was quite small.

IBM (and others) computer tape drives of the 1960s used vacuum buffer columns, see:

Yes I've seen vacuum buffers on tape drives, but I've never heard of tape transport that used a vacuum rather than a pinch roller to force the tape onto the speed-regulated capstan.