My Eight-Year Quest to Digitize 45 Videotapes
mtlynch.io
mtlynch.io
Did the shop provide you with deinterlaced video?
>Did the shop provide you with deinterlaced video?
I think so. The video they gave me is 29.97 FPS, which I think means they deinterlaced it, but my knowledge of video technicals is pretty weak. I didn't realize just how weak until I read a lot of the comment on here and /r/DataHoarders about other stuff I could have tried.
Let me know if you have any questions about switching to MediaGoblin. I'm bad at video but good at software.
Turns out pretty much all the professional scan services use the same scanner, able of scanning a whole magazine automatically. Since there basically is just that one device that can scan magazines and delivers good quality.
But as I slowly learned, this is a typical niche market with no competition, so you can ask any price you want.
The device is made in China and sold under different brands in the west. In the US its pacific images and costs only around 1200$. In Germany it's either Reflecta or Braun, but they want around 1900€.
The device feels cheap, sounds cheap, moving parts feel flimsy. I spent two month tinkering with different software, different settings. It has some quirks. It's slow. If the image is too bright, the included software sets exposure so low that it's scanning to fast for the internal processor and stops every second or so, creating a tiny but notable seam in the image. It's USB 2.0 but definitely not coming close to saturating that bandwidth.
After about 1000 slides, the scanner produced serious artifacts in every scan. Had to send it in for repair.
I don't know how you can make money using this device for scanning services. Not at the prices they charge. You barely cover the retail price once you reach the advertised life span of 20k scans.
My process involved writing a giant python script to open up each giant tape rip in ffmpeg, cut out a part, attach metadata, and save it. To my horror, I found out that cutting up an h264 video stream and creating proper I-frames for the start and end is non-trivial in ffmpeg without fully re-encoding, so I bit the bullet and ran it overnight. I was lucky and only had about 20 hours to encode and it gave me the chance to drop the quality on some to save space.
The hardest part of the project, for anyone looking to take this on, is the data-entry of finding where to split each tape, what's in each video chunk, and whether you even can identify it. In comparison, the hardware and software side is piss easy.
The encoding step for me takes about 20 hours because I'm maximizing quality. That part I don't mind though because I can just run it in the background and grab it when it's done. I've only had to do that 2-3 times, so I don't mind a longer encode job for higher quality.
Yeah, I think it was a case of just not thinking critically enough about what I was doing. I knew it was taking a ton of time to edit, but I thought, "Well, that's just an unescapably manual task because you can't automate finding the starts and ends of clips." The silly part was not realizing that I could batch process the clip boundary finding if I used different tools.
I only tried digitization from one shop, so I can't really compare. The service I used was targeted toward home consumers, so I'd imagine that higher-end shops that serve clients in TV or film could do more to improve quality.
Honestly given the circumstance, that's a really elegant solution. Didn't even need to touch the internals!
The gcsfuse solution to me felt more elegant even though it functioned poorly because everything still worked and all I had to do was mount GCS and add some symlinks where MediaGoblin expected to open files. But it is hard to beat the simplicity of a two-line config change.