Amazing information for someone like me just considering getting into video capture after a few mediocre attempts in the past.

I know what it took to learn all this, and I commend you on sharing it so well.

Babe, new Video Capture Guide just dropped!

Excellent video. Been on my watch list for a while. Lots of options for people to draw from.

10:24 nice reference

I have to say that the signal strength on the minidv tapes do go, and you will get drop outs distortion and audio.

Excellent presentation. Thank you!    --> I have been able to greatly improve my digitized S-VHS tapes using TOPAZ Video. After processing in TOPAZ, the videos are far less "noisy" and they look very good even when viewed on my 70" LG television screen.🙂

0:56 the analog signal on tape is more like pulsy rather than wavey 😊

Somehow, he has returned.

Where does up-scaling occur in the digitizing process? I have a JVC HR-S5000 PAL machine with TBC built in. Edit: nvm the Retrotink 4 upscales to 4k.

Amazing guide! Thanks for your work! Here's another option that I'm using so that I can digitize without my laptop and can simultaneously watch my movies on my projector during the process:

I have 2 different set-ups using DVD recorders for vcr-passthrough depending on the quality/condition of the tape being recorded. Pioneer 550h for tapes with bad flagging and Panasonic DMR-EZ28 for the rest. Both DVRs go through a 2-in, 1-out auto-switching HDMI switch and into a Atomos Ninja 2. Which is a professional film production monitor/recorder from the early 2000's which lets me record interlaced signal albeit only accepting higher resolutions (I use 1080i). The Ninja 2 let's me record lossless video onto it's internal SSD and I don't need to fumble around with hooking my laptop up or having a dedicated PC for this purpose.

There is another step in here for HDCP. And yet another another for EDID emulation since the Ninja is picky about the signal it recieves (I seem to only get a solid signal at 1080 resolutions). But this set-up lets me hit record on the Ninja on-the-fly anytime I see something on screen that interests me while watching my VHS.

What's more- the Panasonic unit lets me simultaneously output from the HDMI and the component outs, which then goes into my Retrotink 4k so I can get really good de-interlacing on my 4k projector. I reckon it's about as good as VHS can look!

One thing I'm curious about your input on. I use a prosumer JVC S-VHS ET deck (HR-S3600U I think...) that has an S-Video output but I've heard that they only output superior image when using S-VHS and that I'm better off sticking to the RCA outs when playing normal VHS. What do you think?

The types of tapes section of the video is a bit tricky because of Digital 8 tapes with analog Hi8 recordings in them, and Digital 8 recordings in the analog Video8/Hi8 tapes hahaha

Anyways for that you just need a Digital 8 camera with analog playback to detect sections in the tape where the recordings are analog Video8/Hi8 or Digital8

And depending on how it looks to the individual is what I've come to learn. I'm sure that the end game in this video is probably true however you know that a lot of people are quite satisfied with whatever method they end up using. It seems like sometimes judging video captures is almost like judging art... Everyone has a visual opinion.

TBC is must

Hello, I have a FireWire card in my PC (Windows 11) with a VIA chip and it works perfectly. I use camcorders from different brands (Sony, Canon, Samsung) in D8 and MIDV and I've never had any problems

Good summary of different capture methods as usual! SDI I'd say is much simpler than traditional analog capture since there are standalone SDI recorders (can be lossless or compressed to something like ProRes422), it's really more of a question of whether you can locate a decent TBC that outputs SDI. There are several models out there from the likes of Snell and Wilcox, Brighteye, DPS/Digital Processing Systems/Harris/Leitch (DPS-470/475/575/x50/x75) that come to mind. Though most of those do tend to work better if a line TBC is already in use.  Another advantage of SDI is that you can hook up an SDI vectorscope and waveform monitor inline with the signal and not have to wonder later if your levels are clipping and is useful for real-time monitoring. You can get good results from analog in/out TBCs like the For.A FA-310 combined with an Analog to SDI converter from Blackmagic, and the Blackmagic device also has audio inputs so that takes care of the audio embedding. The Analog to SDI converters do tend to require very stable input sources though which already have been through a frame TBC in most cases. On frustration with SDI is that some TBCs and recorders that embed audio into the SDI signal will only accept balanced (3 pin XLR) audio inputs, so you may need an extra device to convert RCA into XLR, but those are relatively easy to find at least.

It’s been about 10 years since I last tried to transfer my VHS recordings to a PC, using an old computer with a PCI VC100 capture card for that purpose. The card has two inputs: component and S-Video. The picture quality was better through the S-Video input, but it came with an ugly side effect in the form of a noticeable mesh-like pattern, so I ended up using the component input instead.

14:10 On the IO Data I ran into audio buffer overrun problems and the audio would crack, ended up getting ans Osprey 260e card for $60 off eBay and it resolved everything.

In Europe, the Panasonic ES10 has an extra TBC/Synchronizer chip, while the ES15 only has a poor line TBC in the AV input selection IC. The Panasonic S-VHS recorder NV-HS900EG, with its die-cast aluminum K-drive (rare in the US and Canada), costs around E50 in Europe when broken and around E100 when working. The line TBCs of the Panasonic NV-FS200EG and NV-HS1000EG aren't good enough for me, nor is the frame TBC of the NV-HS950EG. If you adjust the head switching point on the 950 downwards to line 577 (PAL), it goes completely haywire. I've already managed to get the Panasonic NV-HS900EG (which doesn't have TBC at all) working with a Pioneer DVR-560H (which does have a PAL/SECAM/NTSC Frame TBC) in EE-Mode and a Blackmagic recorder (PCIe card with SDI + HDMI input was only briefly available) via RGB HDMI output from the DVD recorder. However, the signal chain, consisting of an HDMI splitter + dummy CVBS output converter, RGB HDMI to SDI + SDI to YUV HDMI converter, still needs to be simplified and tested long-term. I haven't noticed any errors with the VIA chip when using Firewire under Windows 7, but so far I've only filmed the very short video on cassette removal for Panasonic K-drives. The best thing to do is leave the camcorder running for hours with the camera function and software that detects DV errors. I don't like TI. All my opinion😉

thanks for the video ! do you know where you can find prefered cameras & VCR for the RF Capture way ? cheers