![]() ![]() Use a 4 head S-VHS with component output and Time base correction to reduce fringing and poor color. Its the 4:2:0 interframe codecs with low bitrate that cause the most damage. motionjpeg works great for this and doesn't take up too much bandwidth. Specialized equipment only need to be able to capture 4:2:2 or even 4:4:4 in intraframe mode. If the discussion starter MUST do this conversion him/herself using the aforementioned Elgato device, then I would recommend keeping the 640 x 480 resolution, Pixel ratio set to "Square Pixel (1.0)," Field Order set to "None (Progressive scan)," and then exporting the edited result to 320 x 240 resolution (using a 1.0 pixel ratio) or 352 x 240 (using the "NTSC DV (0.9091)" pixel ratio). This specialized equipment will be much more expensive than even the most expensive of Macs and servers. Properly converting VHS to digital will require specialized equipment that's way beyond the scope of PC do-it-yourselfers. All analog video is interlaced - but cheaper capture devices like the Elgato shoot themselves in the foot by always deinterlacing interlaced footage before they even send it to the PC. What's worse, the Elgato cannot really keep interlacing. Thus, image quality loss when converting from analog VHS to digital is unavoidable due to the resampling of pixel content no matter what. The vertical resolution is fixed at 480 pixels. With an aspect ratio of 4:3 NTSC, that would translate to an effective total horizontal resolution of only about 350 to 360 pixels. You see, the effective horizontal resolution of most VHS footage is only about 270 pixels per picture height. I'm sure that it would be possible to get a little bit better quality with something like the Canopus, but the time to get that marginal improvement would be substantial and I'd rather have them converted so we can enjoy them than to have more years go buy that I don't want to mess with it due to the time and complexity.Actually, most VHS footage is already extremely low quality to begin with. particularly on the 30 minute vhs-c tapes. I have stopped bothering with chapter markers because the aTV interface is so quick to fast forward. You can solve the metadata problem with another app called MetaX. You don't have any ability to add meta data and you can't add chapter markers. You can control the name and location of the file being saved, and you have a nice tool to trim the beginning and end of the video. The mpeg4 produces a larger file, so I'm sticking with that. The only downside is you have very little control over the process. The Video Capture does it all in one step. I had been using in the past the EyeTV 250 Plus, and then exporting them to aTV format in h.264, but this adds about 50% to the time. It was creating a green frame below the image and the image was half the size it should be. The other problem I had was the Black Magic was not playing back correctly on the aTV2. particularly the edges that get jagged from uprezing. The Elgato converted video is a bit softer than the output from the Black Magic, but with the poor quality of the videos this actually makes it look a little better to me in some cases. The Black Magic and Elgato are very similar devices. Maybe I'll go back after they are done and take a few to try that on. If I knew what I was doing, its probably possible to filter and edit the video to get it looking good, but for the number of tapes I have to convert there is no way I'll spend the time doing that. It takes WAY longer to do it this way, and what you end up with in my opinion is not as good of quality. If you use that, the video comes in as DV and you then use iMovie to convert and encode your video. I am directing them to a NAS and will use a jailbroken Apple TV 2 and Firecore aTV Flash Media Player to play them back.Įveryone raves about the Canopus which I've had for a couple of years but never really used it for much. After a day of playing, I am going to use the Elgato Video Capture to convert my hundred or so VHS and VHS-C tapes. ![]() Actually I tried and compared the Elgato Video Capture, Elgato EyeTV 250 Plus, Black Magic Video Recorder, and Canopus ADVC110. ![]()
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