I spent much longer on this project than I expected to, and I learned a lot from the experience. I wrote this in hopes that it might be useful for others who want to digitize their old photos and home videos.
I'm happy to answer any questions or take any feedback about this post. I'm by no means an expert on digitization or video processing, but I'll gladly share what I know.
Timebase correction just fixes up the sync pulses so they arrive in an orderly fashion, which improves the picture quality.
In retrospect, I should have spent more time studying the technical side of of digitization. My process was to just Google problems as I encountered them so I could get unstuck. I never took a step back to understand the fundamentals, but I think that would have saved time overall.
"The NTSC field refresh frequency in the black-and-white system originally exactly matched the nominal 60 Hz frequency of alternating current power used in the United States. Matching the field refresh rate to the power source avoided intermodulation (also called beating), which produces rolling bars on the screen. Synchronization of the refresh rate to the power incidentally helped kinescope cameras record early live television broadcasts, as it was very simple to synchronize a film camera to capture one frame of video on each film frame by using the alternating current frequency to set the speed of the synchronous AC motor-drive camera. When color was added to the system, the refresh frequency was shifted slightly downward by 0.1% to approximately 59.94 Hz to eliminate stationary dot patterns in the difference frequency between the sound and color carriers, as explained below in 'Color encoding'. By the time the frame rate changed to accommodate color, it was nearly as easy to trigger the camera shutter from the video signal itself."
https://video.stackexchange.com/questions/32492/what-causes-...
I was wondering if the digitisation company provided any kind of report. The sawtooth graph of your audio and video sync issue presents itself as being a hardware rather than software issue, envisioning ammonitic erosion of a plastic spindle. I'm just wondering whether this was fixed with the (despite your heroic attempts to source) right hardware, or if a software algorithm was involved (handcoded, ML?)
Yes, I feel very fortunate that my family recorded so much, and I do look forward to sharing it with my children.
One of the interesting parts of revisiting this footage is just seeing how attitudes towards video changed over time, at least among my circles. When I was a child, home video recording seemed so novel, even to my parents, that there was an excitement and enthusiasm in a lot of the videos just based on the sheer fact that we were recording a home video. Nowadays, I don't think people are as excited to record these kind of "slice of life" videos, even my friends with children.
The digitization company did provide a report, but it wasn't very detailed. They just listed which tapes seemed to have physical degradation or imperfections. I don't know what their methodology was, but I didn't get the impression that it was anything especially advanced. I imagine that they just trained some technicians to use their equipment and then run through a standard process for each tape.
Simply put, the entirety of 1 "frame" has more data than required, but a CRT TV would hide those "error margins" behind the borders. Your digital capture however has grabbed all the available data, and the pro would have done the same, but they would have then cropped it down to the desired area/resolution. You can see this when you compare the videos side by side, as the baby is "longer" in the pro version.
>You can see this when you compare the videos side by side, as the baby is "longer" in the pro version.
The baby in the video is actually me at five months old, although I'm quite a bit "longer" today.
I've got a decent capture setup (semi-Professional gear that captures at up to 10-bit uncompressed 4:2:2 - over 100GB an hour!) that I obtained basically for free since it is fairly old (early 2000s). Since good VHS decks are getting harder (and more expensive) to find, I haven't got a good[1] one yet. I'd be interested to know if the difference between the two decks was noticeable!
[1] I consider the recommendations on this thread: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/video-restore/1567-vcr-buyin... to be fairly good at separating good VHS decks from the rest of the pack.
VHS only has 3MHz bandwidth, let's don't pretend that a software-defined VTR is not practical.
Answering your actual question: S-VHS vs VHS deck should not make any difference for playback of VHS cassettes. Cassettes recorded in S-VHS cannot be played on a VHS deck, so that would be an obvious difference.
My (admittedly basic) understanding of VHS vs S-VHS decks is that due to the stricter tolerances required by the S-VHS standard, S-VHS decks typically have better transports than regular VHS decks (lower wow/flutter, better tracking, etc...). And of course many of the high-end decks have a built in TBC.
S-VHS decks weren't necessarily any better than VHS ones, and the two formats are incompatible.
Mitsubishi, Panasonic, and Sony made the best VHS VCRs, IIRC. The best ones for capture maybe different, but this is what I recall for analog NTSC playback. S-Video connectors, if you can get them may help, but not always.
If I were going green-field the design of a VHS/S-VHS VCR from scratch today, I use some sort of solid-state helical-scan-equivalent head that can over-capture tape domains, pre-process data to align scan lines per PAL or NTSC, and output unencrypted HDMI.
thx!
Once I realized I could script the editing, that became the least stressful part to me. Fixing mistakes was just a matter of tweaking some code and re-running the scripts. Capturing, to me, was harder because I constantly worried about missteps that would cause quality losses I'd only discover later.
I found any free video editing options out there difficult to learn and unintuitive. I ended up using Sony Vegas which was a big improvement.
In my case I only needed to offset my audio track to get it to sync and it was fine. However some of my videos have that same tell-tale edge tearing, I didn’t bother trying to fix it.
Now when I see a camera out somewhere, all I can think is "oh jeez...are they gonna publish this on freaking Facebook?" and debate whether to ask (and risk coming off like the paranoid nutjob acting like a buzzkill).
Now when I see a camera out somewhere, all I can think is "oh jeez...are they gonna publish this on freaking Facebook?" and debate whether to ask (and risk coming off like the paranoid nutjob being a buzzkill).
>mediagoblin looks like the perfect solution for hosting media in a more convenient way than just folders and files.
I'll just warn you now that MediaGoblin is deceptively hard to work with. I chose it because I got it up and running quickly, but over time, I'd keep running into issues that should have been simple but required digging through their source and sometimes making my own patches. It also doesn't specify dependencies very precisely, so I constantly had issues installing it when its dependencies changed out from under it and broke everything. I tried hard for a while to get my patches merged upstream to prevent others from re-doing my work[0], but the project has effectively been unmaintained for the past 2+ years, save for a few brief spurts of work every few months.
If I were starting from scratch, I'd use a static site generator like Hugo or Gatsby to just generate thumbnails and URLs for each clip. You'd have to write a little custom code, but I suspect it's less time overall than you'd spend getting MediaGoblin to work.
[0] https://issues.mediagoblin.org/ticket/5574 (their bugtracker is currently down, which should give you a sense of the state of the project)
Glad this was reposted as I missed it first time 'round.
One of the difficult parts of the process that you can't really "productize" is cataloguing. If you receive a stranger's videotapes, you wouldn't be able to label a clip, "Grandma Alice Visits for Bobby's Kindergarten Graduation," because you don't know anyone's names or relationships or the context of the video.
There might be a product in a tool that helps people edit and tag clips after they've digitized them, but I'm not passionate enough about that work to go after a product like that.
But, yes, definitely. That was the biggest breakthrough in this project. I'm glad it came to me, as it otherwise would have taken me hundreds more hours, or I'd have given up before finishing.