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Old 2010-02-23, 02:17 PM
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awolfoutwest awolfoutwest is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2005
Location: Las Montañas
Re: VHS Transfers & Quality [moved from the Van Halen Largo thread]

Amateur video transfer hobbyist here, specializing in Grateful Dead and related source material. I have been transferring since 2004, and released numerous transfers to the community.

My approach is simple, and my budget is limited. Here is my current capture/ encode chain:

JVC SRV10U S-VHS w/ Time Base Corrector & Digital NR engaged > s-video > ATI TV Wonder 650 > VirtualDub 1.9.8 w/ HuffYUV > AVIsynth 2.5.8 > CinemaCraft Encoder 2.70

or

Panasonic PV-9450 VHS VCR > composite > ATI TV Wonder 650 >
VirtualDub 1.9.8 w/ HuffYUV > AVIsynth 2.5.8 > CinemaCraft Encoder 2.70

Funny thing, the "nothing special" Panasonic often gives a cleaner playback than the JVC deck, composite cable and all. I also have an i.den IVT-7 TBC and a AVT8710 TBC that I can insert into the chain if needed. I do my viewing on an old Commodore 1702 monitor, which is a nice NTSC CRT with chroma and luma inputs. I have done color calibration on the monitor, on the video card that feeds the monitor (ATI radeon x1950pro), on the capture card, and on the TBC where applicable, all done using the test patterns and filters in the AVIA guide to Home Theater.

I capture to my hard drive using the lossless HuffYUV codec - 1 hour of video is about 50GB with an average of 3.5:1 compression. VirtualDub is a great freeware program that fits my capture needs. All of my processing is done via scripting with the AVIsynth freeware frameserver software - very powerful and allows total control of virtually all aspects of the video stream.

I can sense you video professionals cringing I cannot afford pro-grade equipment, and have concentrated on doing the best I can with the gear I have. I have done my share of botching the video stream, and have hopefully learned enough to avoid future mishaps. I am always trying to improve my capture process, and usually include a split-screen clip showing raw capture vs processed video. I take the "Occam's Razor" approach to video processing - the simplest strategy is the best. Capture, process once, encode once, author, release...