* I borrowed a good quality VHS player with SCART connector because it sends RGB in separate channels, improving quality considerably. Don't use the single channel composite video.
* Then I bought a cheap SCART to HDMI convertor and used a borrowed HDMI capture card.
* I recorded it with OBS studio and the resulting video looks very good.
So my total costs were about 20$ (for the adapter).
There is the ultimate solution https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode , but that requires modifying your VCR.
Then proceed with something to digitize the analog output from SCART2.
A couple of models with this feature:
The bigger difference is the VCR (you need one of those, too) and the capture device.
The capture device is a whole thing. See for instance Technology Connections on YouTube.
Depending on what you then capture with, you may need to attenuate the video signal with a potentiometer if the image is too bright and washed out.
I'd be surprised at that - normally they'd emit Y/C or at best YUV.
It doesn't make any sense to move the Y/C to RGB conversion into the VHS player.
From my understanding this is the "bottleneck" in quality for older systems (at least in gaming consoles), converting Analogue to Digital. Which is why "RetroTink" sells different converters from ~$100 up to $750 (RetroTINK-4K Pro). I've seen a few videos comparing cheap generic USB converters with more expensive upscalers and there is a noticeable difference in image quality
Instead of cobbling together an impressive array of tools though, I just got a trial of Final Cut Pro and pulled out everything with that. You can get what I think is a three month trial? Anyway, it was plenty for this one time effort of digitizing old Hi8 tapes.
I think I did end up using Handbrake to take the raws down to a reasonable size to give to family members, but the raw footage and project files I stuck on a couple of 1TB Sandisk drives to keep in physically separate backup locations.
However, Apple has removed Firewire support entirely from macOS Tahoe so none of these solutions will work on Mac going forward.
I still use DV/DVCAM tapes because I like shooting with old cameras, and I capture the same way I have for about 25 years when I used a VX2000 to shoot DV for a commercial digital streaming company that did all sorts of training videos.
Cheap crappy PCIe Firewire card (back in the day it was PCI, but no-one has that now), and dvgrab to get a raw DV stream off tape, then ffmpeg -i dvgrab-001.dv -c copy whateveritscalled.avi to rewrap it in something the editing software can read. These days I use DaVinci Resolve on Linux, in the olden days I used Premiere 5 on Windows 2000.
Even back then I used to capture on Linux and then bring it into Windows 2000 because only Linux had reliable Firewire support.
Can be expensive to get but if the camera doesn't break during use you can resell them easily.
At the risk of being smited by professional archivists, I'm willing to wager that 99.9% of people can't tell the difference between a $5k archival rig and one of these higher quality camcorders. At this point it really feels like the biggest inhibiter to good quality digitization is the decaying of the tape versus the archival setup.
That said - for anyone with the time, patience, and soldering abilities I would love a more proper A/B test with RF signal capture software encoding. Something like this:
https://rastrillo.ca/digitizing-video8-tapes-with-vhs-decode...
It wouldn't have been crazy to spend $4,000 to have the professionals do it, so long as they produced a reasonably equivalent high-quality result.
VHS is a composite signal on the tape itself. Composite for sake of this thread means black and white detail plus color information. S-VHS has higher bandwidth in the luma (detail) but the same limited color bandwidth. And there are two audio standards. But there is no "RGB out."
At a minimum you want a device with S-Video out (it keeps the two signals on separate wires). You also need a time base corrector. These come in two forms. One is line-based sometimes built into DVD players. This is how Jason Scott at Internet Archive does it and it's wrong.
The other form of corrector requires a separate box and corrects each frame in full. Many boxes claim to be time base correctors but are not. They are "synchronizers" or amps. Don't buy until you understand the differences.
There are two time sources (not really clocks) in a VCR. The first is physical tape wobbling and stretching over a head that's spinning far faster than seems possible. Line TBC is a tiny buffer that reconstructs the sync of the luma on each line.
The other timing source is the overall signal sync. A proper TBC reconstructs this overall sync on a frame by frame basis and presents something sane to the capture card. Without it you'll drop frames silently, audio falls out of sync, and all the other crap that happens when you try to watch video older than an iPhone. Consumer video capture is total crap and you won't see it until you try to encode, edit, or watch it on a different device. And then you'll be very confused working back to the original problem.
But follow this careful path where you actually capture a clean, proper signal and feed it into even the cheapest Blackmagic box and you're good.
ChatGPT will walk you through this and seems to know more about proper ffmpeg settings than the developers themselves or 30,000 conflicting StackOverflow messages on the topic.
https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode/wiki/
In the (original) spirit of this site, where people get curious and go off and solve impossible problems, I can point to this guy who gets it. He rants better than I do.
https://www.reddit.com/user/TheRealHarrypm
Read on for my rant if you care.
The last useful decks were built 25 years ago. Even then there's acres of bad advice on the internet, specifically around prosumer decks with built-in TBC that isn't sufficient to provide a proper signal to a modern video capture card.
So find any S-VHS deck that actually runs well, S-Video out into a external TBC. Blackmagic owns the cheap-but-great category for capture. Then ffmpeg to suit your storage budget.
Beyond that, things are so screwed up online around preservation technology and knowledge that my advice is to seek the services of a professional if the material is important. Or go ahead and DIY if you're just doing amateur stuff or you're a hoarder trying to justify your conditions. But try to refrain from posting your secret sauce; it likely isn't. Organize and post the videos instead. Most won't, because they know they look like shit and they can't handle the feedback.
I just did a quick Google search and found this on a formal preservation website: "This means that S-VHS tapes are playable in VHS decks but VHS tapes are not playable in S-VHS decks." https://psap.library.illinois.edu/collection-id-guide/videot...
Exactly backwards.
I don't think I've ever read an article about analog media of any type on the internet that didn't have me screaming at the screen.
PySceneDetect only uses basic heuristic methods right now so it does require some degree of tuning to get things working for certain data sets. Your post inspired me to look into maybe integrating TransNetV2 as a detector in the future!
If you happen to know a better apriori threshold I would be happy to re-run the analysis and update the chart.
The threshold values themselves can be tuned if you generate a statsfile and plot the result, but that can sometimes be tedious if you have a lot of files (thus the huge interest in methods like TransNetV2). Glad to see the real world applications of those in action. You can always just increase/decrease the threshold by 5-10% depending on if you find it's too sensitive or not sensitive enough as well.
Thanks for the response!
precision 0.397, recall 0.727, F1 0.513, mean temporal error 0.307 s
Also multiple boxes of slides, I know you can buy the scanners (I had one). Wish there was a cheaper automated way hahaha
suchoudh•2mo ago
If someone knows a faster and good way pls share.
thanks
o11c•2mo ago
It turns out that a lot of old tape players have either failed completely or else add excessive background hissing.
Most tapes don't record all the way to the end so you will have to cut it digitally regardless.
pjc50•2mo ago
actionfromafar•2mo ago
https://github.com/HENDRIX-ZT2/pyaudiorestoration
Key IMHO is "Speed matching to hum frequency".
There are also commercial products which does similar things.
https://www.celemony.com/en/capstan
https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/digitizing-tapes/62996/2