Looking for state of art of digitizing vhs

[DaveKov345]

I am new to all this but I am hoping that someone can tell me the various solutions to capturing vhs in the best way possible, with as high a bitrate as possible. Then I can encode it to smaller size if I want or just save to a playable dvd.
I have old home movies plus some out of print adult movies which are still valuable to me. After a while, all my tapes will be unplayable of course. I am wondering partly, how do they convert the old movies to dvd. It seems like when they want to do a good job, it's noticeably better than what the more experienced people can do at home.
What would I need for this?
I want to capture at maybe 8000 bitrate at least.
I am willing to do some additional editing and color correction if it only takes a couple hours maybe.
Thanks for any help

[Zogg]

I've never seen a VCR with a better output interface than S-video, so you need to start with a capture card or device that has an S-video input as well as a good VCR.

You can use BeyondTV to record in this manner by setting up a dummy channel. For the recording quality BTV goes up to 20000, but that is probably way too high. 8000 CBR is probably good but you could do a bit higher just to make sure like 10000. Be sure and set the capture resolution to 720x480. You might also do better with the software that comes with the capture device.

As for the device to use, I'm not sure. The quality will be the same regardless of whether you use PCI or USB. I'd look for a device that will give you some use down the road, so it will have the analog S-video input and maybe an ATSC/QAM tuner as well.

Finally, don't forget that most store-bought VHS videos have macrovision protection. There are some devices that you feed the video through to get rid of it. I've never used one but you can find info on them.

I haven't done any of this in a long time but I actually have a few tapes I need to convert myself one of these days. Good luck!

[Bigbird999]

Not much point in capturing VHS at any bitrate above 3000 - 4000 because of the low resolution of the original tape. And the max bitrate for video DVD compliant mpeg is 9000 @720x480 including audio so you could not author a DVD with any higher bitrate. FWIW, most commercial DVDs are 4000ish variable bitrate. Try a google search for some older "how to" posts on after dawn or video help web sites.

BB

[Zogg]

Originally Posted by Bigbird999

Not much point in capturing VHS at any bitrate above 3000 - 4000 because of the low resolution of the original tape. And the max bitrate for video DVD compliant mpeg is 9000 @720x480 including audio so you could not author a DVD with any higher bitrate. FWIW, most commercial DVDs are 4000ish variable bitrate. Try a google search for some older "how to" posts on after dawn or video help web sites.

BB

Actually most commercial DVD's are around 6000ish VBR, and I've seen higher on some.

You're right about the max DVD bitrate. I pretty much don't bother burning real DVD's any more since I can just transcode the video to H.264 or even DivX and have a better picture in a smaller file size. That was my thinking when recommending he pick a high bitrate, since he can always transcode smaller or to a different codec. If the goal is to burn the VHS to a DVD, then you are right it's probably better to just capture at the desired bitrate.

But I used to record some S-VHS that looked pretty darn good, so I'd go ahead and capture it higher than 4000 because it can't hurt. Depends on the quality of the tapes and the end goal.

[Rich A]

Mostly the "bit" rate will have less to do with "quality" than with motion detection.

By that I mean the higher the bit rate the more error-free the playback in high motion scenes will be.

If the bit rate is low, and there are a lot of high speed action frames (explosions, car chases etc) then you might see some of what we call "motion artifacts". Because of a too low bit rate something like fire flames or an explosion will become "blocky". The quality per se won't change, but you'll see those motion artifacts. If the video is mostly static scenes (like talking heads) then you won't see any difference between a high bit rate or low bit rate. This is what the nature of variable bit rate encoding is all about. It is designed to encode at a nominal bit rate and if the scene is very much static, the bit rate will be lowered. If the scene is very action-filled then it will increase the bit rate. Bit rate is one of the biggest contributors to file size. So being able to "vary" the bit rate can save a lot in the way of over-all file size.

Using an S-VHS source will certainly be better than a standard VHS tape. S-VHS has a somewhat higher resolution than standard VHS. Provided of course that the actual recorded show was recorded in S-VHS. An S-VHS player will of course play back standard VHS tapes. But to get the best quality available the actual source (as recorded) should have been recorded using S-VHS.

I'm often asked how the commercial DVD makers are able to make a DVD-resolution and quality DVD from an old film that was made 10 20 or 30 years ago. People forget that most of the newer (1950's up) big screen films are in 35 mm. When you went to the movie house to view the movie (in say the 60's) haven't you ever wondered how they can blow up the movie to a play on that huge screen with beautiful color and quality?

Well that is because the source is an actual "film" ... (pretty sure they were 35 mm) And a 35 mm film is WAY higher in resolution than even today's Blu-Ray res. So when a commercial DVD is made, it is using for it's source the actual FILM version of the movie. Plus for the really good stuff, they actually have a technician who can manually control the bit rate and adjust it for certain scenes.

Of course we at home do not have the original "film" to digitize. Rather we have a copy of a copy of ..... the original. This is why a movie like "Gone With the Wind" could be produced many years later to a dvd resolution on a commercial DVD. It's all about the source.

In today's world they now have video cams that can record digitally in very high resolutions. Up to 1920 x 1080, which is BlueRay definition. Even so, an original 35 mm film would still be a better source. BUT since the highest consumer video playback is presently 1920 x 1080, there is no longer any need to use actual film for movie making. This means less work to do any kind of analog to digital conversion (capturing the analog film strip to digital). It's ready (at the end of the shoot) to be edited, or easily converted to some other form/resolution. Although the camera equipment isn't cheap, it's not much more than an analog film 35 mm movie camera. And the end result directly out of the camera is as good as it gets, and already in digital format. I don't know that much about the actual digital movie cameras being used by film studios, but I would guess that they record at a VERY high constant bit rate to insure there are no artifacts and then post-capture they are trans-coding the original digital source to be variable bit rate and either DVD or Blu-ray compliant.

Hope this helps. Sorry for coming on board so late. For some reason I must have missed this thread. The subject is something I've had a lot of experience with.