best Capture Settings to capture VHS Video Tapes

[sjj1805]

I remember you having a tutorial on the best Capture Settings (preferences) to capture VHS Video Tapes, but I can't seem to find it now doing a search. Do you still have a link to that?

Thanks,

Jim Winder

[sjj1805]

I think you might be referring to my Suggested Workflow

In that thread what I suggest is that you work out in advance how long the video will last after editing - i.e. removal of adverts from a TV program.
Then you can set your capture settings accordingly.

So if your completed video lasts a hour you can use a high bit rate
if it last 2 hours a lower bit rate.

What Bit Rate Settings etc Should I use?

[sjj1805]

This helps, but it is not what I had seen before. What you had talked about was actually going into the Preferences and setting all the values within Ulead VS 10...things like, how you were going to save what you were capturing (IE; AVI, MPEG2; the bitrate; lower vs upper field, etc.)

What I am needing to do is capture all my videos on my old VHS tapes. I have done several, but the quality just isn't what I would expect it to be. It looks fine on my computer when I am capturing it, but then when I replay what I have captured, it does not look the same (hence, I am thinking I have something not set right). Could it be my capture card (it is just an inexpensive ATI one). or perhaps how I am capturing the video? I tried do a search to see what Capture Card you guys would recommend, but did not find anything...and I know that depends on so many other variables.

I have used both the Ulead and Windows Movie Maker capture with the same results.

[sjj1805]

In accordance with this link
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Were you looking for this link?
VS10:Preferences and Project Settings

[Ken Berry]

As for the types of capture devices, you might be interested in the following response I gave another user asking about them:

First, I personally think the best devices for analogue capture are ones that can capture in DV format. For that, of course, you need a firewire connection at either end. Canopus and Plextor and I think Adstech with its Pyro series make such capture devices which have a built in chip which converts the incoming analogue signal to DV and transmits it via firewire to your computer. Unfortunately, these devices are at the top end of the market (around $300, some more, some less...) But they do a really excellent job and of course VS can "see" them...

You can get the same effect, though, by using your mini DV video camera as a passthrough capture device -- that's if you have a mini DV camera. Its manual will indicate if it can be used this way, but most recent ones ( i.e. over the past 3 years or so) will do it. Essentially, you connect an analogue video camera or VCR to your mini DV camera's AV-In plug using RCA or RCA/S-Video cables. The mini DV converts the signal to DV and transmits it via firewire as above.

I opted for a third option along these lines as I, like many others, have a huge collection of analogue 8mm tapes. So I bought two years ago a top of the line Sony Digital 8 camera which had only then been released (model DCR-TRV480). Not all Digital 8s will do this, but you can actually stick an analogue 8mm or Hi8 tape in the Sony, and it will play it back and convert it to DV format which again is transmitted via the camera's firewire connection. The quality is truly excellent, and my analogue tapes captured this way are not much worse than captured authetic DV tapes appear after capture.

There was a hiccup when VS11 first appeared. Corel had changed the capture plug-in and for some reason, the new one could not "see" any device that was capturing from an analogue source via firewire. That included all three of the above options. The 6 November 2007 patch issued by Corel resolved the first two, but not that with Digital 8 cameras actually playing an analogue tape -- though such a camera can also be used as a passthrough device and this aspect now works. So the patch fixed most of those problems (and I can capture from it when it plays analogue tapes, using other programs... so no big deal).

Moving beyond that, you get into cheaper options which are essentially ones which capture to mpeg-2 (and some other formats, including mpeg-1 and usually uncompressed .avi which is huge and effectively unmanageable to edit, so I will restrict my comments to those which capture mpeg-2). Again there is an enormous variety, most of which, I have to say, I would never go near. And this tends to include just about everything which costs $50 or less.

There is a slight problem, though, with my pickiness in that more expensive mpeg-2 capture cards or devices, while they might do a good job, tend to be invisible to VS for capture purposes. This is often caused deliberately by their manufacturers who do not want to share their technological secrets with software manufacturers like Corel/Ulead. I personally think one of the very best in this field is the Adstech DVDXpress DX2. If you look for it, make sure you are looking for the DX2 as there was a predecessor called DVDXpress which was not so wonderful. It does an excellent job of capturing DVD high quality mpeg-2 because it has an in-built chip which transcodes the analogue signal on the fly to mpeg-2, so your computer does not have any hard work to do. The cheaper devices, without such a chip, impose an enormous burden on the computer, since mpeg-2 conversion on the fly is very resource intensive, and that is why so many people with these devices have so many problems. Now the 'problem' with the DX2 is that VS cannot see it for capture purposes. But the good news is that it comes with the excellent Adstech proprietary capture program CapWiz. So you capture with that and then simply insert those mpeg-2s into VS for editing. I think that device costs around the $100 mark, but well worth it.

Beyond that, you move into the field of TV/capture cards, and I have had very good experiences with the WinFast products -- originally one of the analogue TV cards, but currently the DTV2000 H, which is an excellent high definition TV card, but can also capture excellent quality mpeg-2 (both HD and SD) from other devices. That card costs less than $100. Although VS can see it, I still tend to use the WinFast software which came with it for capture, then edit that in VS. Others report good things of the Hauppage TV/capture cards, but with those you definitely have to use their own software for capture. I recently bought a wonderful Quad 6600 media computer which has the DVico Fusion HDTV capture card in it, and its quality is truly awesome, and it has twin TV tuners built in so you can watch one while recording from the other, or record from the two! It costs over $200 but is probably worth it. The big downside, though is that it captures in the .ts (transport stream) format of mpeg-2 (again both HD and SD), and not many programs can deal natively with that format. You can set it to record directly in normal mpeg-2 but I am not satisfied so far with the results from that. However, the card has its own little software converter to convert the .ts to a variety of formats, including mpeg-2 and DivX. However, it seems rather unpredictable to me. But if you have a specialised mpeg editor like Video ReDo or MainConcept's Eve, they can also happily convert .ts to standard format, do so making sure things like GOPs are correct, and even take out ads if you have recorded TV programs!! Then you can open the new files in VS for editing.

Anyway, there's some food for thought for you. Good luck!

[Ken Berry]

Regarding settings, as you may know, apart from frame size, it is essentially the bitrate which determines the final quality of a video. Basically, the higher the bitrate, the higher the quality the final video will have. And this applies to analogue source video as it does to digital.

But the problem is that analogue source video is not digital, and is -- even at its best -- of lower quality than digital video, and there is nothing you can do about that. Many people argue that, just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, it is largely a waste of time and hard disk space to capture analogue source material using high quality settings. They further argue that there is no significant quality improvement using a bitrate much higher than 4000 or 4500 kbps which will enable you to burn 2 hours of edited analogue onto a DVD, though in my opinion, the quality will only be average.

I happen to belong to the more optimistic school. As I indicated in my other response above, I tend to use either a Sony Digital 8 for direct capture of my analogue tapes via Firewire, or else a mini DV camera used as a pass-through device from a VCR (I don't have an analogue camera). And I believe the quality from that warrants a higher quality bitrate setting. And space is not really a consideration to me -- I just want to burn my memories in as high a quality as I can obtain. I thus capture my DV via firewire and after editing, convert it to DVD compatible mpeg-2 using a bitrate of 6000 kbps, and I find the results to be very good and noticeably better than a bitrate in the range of 4000 kbps. I confess, though, that raising it much above 6000 kbps does not produce any noticeable improvement in quality.

If you are capturing direct to mpeg-2 using an el cheapo device, and the quality of your analogue tape is good, then I would still belong to the optimistic school. Moreover, to compensate for any shortcomings in the capture device, I would want to get as good a quality capture as I could and maintain that throughout the editing and the end production from that of a DVD-compatible mpeg-2 which I could then burn to DVD. So I would use a full frame format (720 x 576 for PAL or 720 x 480 for NTSC) and a capture bitrate of 6000 kbps. Capture of analogue video from most capture devices (except ones that use firewire) will be Upper Field First.

And you can use any of the normal DVD audio formats. LPCM will give you arguably the highest quality, but the files are relatively large. Using Dolby or mpeg layer 2 audio will still give you excellent quality audio for what is after all only analogue audio to start with.

And I would ensure that my project properties were the same, and after editing, I would go to Share > Create Video File > Same as First Clip, or Same as Project Properties. That means you would be maintaining the same higher quality settings from capture through to production of your DVD, so there is less quality loss possible.

Make sure you have ticked the box in the Project Settings icon -- the middle of the three in the bottom left of the burning module, when you get to that stage -- that says 'Do not convert compliant mpeg files'. That means that Video Studio will not change your already compliant, high quality mpeg-2 and convert it, with consequent loss of quality, to some other properties.

[jimswinder]

Hey..

Thanks to you both for your input...very much appreciated and helpful. I currently have an ATI Wonder Pro TV Tuner / Capture Card...and by the sounds of it, I should upgrade to something better. I have been wanting to buy a Prosumer type video camera like the Cancon GL-2 or the Panasonic AG-HVX200...would these work, as discussed, to covert my analouge VHS tapes, if I played my VCR through them?

Another thing that sounds like I was doing wrong (and please tell me if I read this wrong), is that I should NOT be capturing it as an .avi file, rather it should be an mpeg2 file? (I know this captures with the largest file space, but hard disk space is not a problem for me). I ask, because when I first read a tutroial here on this forum about a year ago (which, the one you included a link to is not the one I had read, but I believe it has the info I was looking for), I could swear it said to use the .avi format to capture and get the best quality for editing and THEN render it to a .mpeg...as everything else, I guess this is just sometimes a personal preference, right?

Again, thanks for your inputs...

[Ken Berry]

I don't know if the GL-2 can be used as a play-through device, though as it is a mini DV system, I suspect it could -- though you would need to consult the dealer on that or look at its manual. The Panasonic AG-HVX200 is a high definition camera which uses mini DV tapes. But honestly, I don't know if high def cameras had pass-through built into them. Again, you would need to do separate research on them. They are both nice cameras, though it seems a little like using a pile-driver to crack a walnut to use them for capturing analogue tapes!

Re capturing .avi, no your memory was not faulty. And in fact I said much the same in my first post above when I recommended devices that could capture in DV format. DV is a compressed format that uses .avi as its extension. That is the problem, though, since there is a large variety of video formats which use the .avi extension. AVI is really a carrier or wrapper format, in other words. It goes from true uncompressed .avi which is really huge (65 GB per hour of video), through DV/AVI (13 GB per hour) through to highly compressed mpeg-4 formats like DivX and XVid where you can fit one hour or more of high quality video onto a 700 MB CD.

Uncompressed .avi is frankly too large to edit easily. And at the other end of the spectrum, DivX and XVid is also not meant to be edited, and expanding it back out to the format needed to burn a DVD (mpeg-2), means that you will lose quality. That is why I said that if you could not use a device (mini DV camera as pass-through, external DV capture device or Digital 8 camera playing analogue tapes directly or being used as pass-through), then the best format to capture is the one which will be need eventually to burn a DVD -- in other words, mpeg-2.

[Trevor Andrew]

Hi jimswinder

My thoughts on mpeg and avi capture

Dv-Avi capture is digital capture from my Mini Dv-Type camcorder (Panasonic gs 400)
Ok-- this transfers the video data without re-coding, (via firewire) I have no capture properties to select.
Other than Dv-Type 1.

Capturing to any other format requires re-coding.(assuming i am making a dvd)

If I were to capture Analogue (Vhs tape), I would select Dvd as the capture format.
This is the format required to create a disc. (Mpeg Properties)

But I would have to select the capture properties, Especially if the video is longer than 60 minutes.
Getting the bit rate correct is important.

Then I edit and Create Video File using the same Mpeg settings.

I see no reason to re-code to Avi during capture, only to recode again to Mpeg.

[jimswinder]

Sorry for my continued confusion...I guess I am looking for a black and white answer in a grey video world.

So, now I am reading that what you said is, it is best to capture in whatever the format was originally recorded? If that is so, how does one go about finding out what that is? I thought analouge was just that, analouge. The VHS tapes I am wanting to capture are up to 27 years old...back in the day when my Panasonic Video Camera was a 3 tube wonder and the "Portable" Cassette Deck I had to carry around was in a backpack strapped to my back.

Knowing me, I am probably making this more difficult that it has to be. All I want to do is get my 100 or so tapes on DVD's, get rid of the tapes, then go back and be able to download the video from the DVD's and be able to edit them into some decent videos that might be worth watching.

Thanks...

[Ken Berry]

Yes, you are making it a bit more difficult than it really is. Video Studio is about editing digital video. So you have start with digital video, and that have to come from somewhere. You have a pile of VHS tapes which are not digital -- they are, as you know, analogue. So they have to be converted to digital, and to do that you need a converter of some kind. OK? So that was what that discussion was all about. Converting analogue into a digital format and what is the best way to do it.

Then you have to decide which is the best digital format to convert the analogue tape into. And of course we had a long discussion about that. We did not say that you capture in the original format. That would obviously serve no purpose when dealing with analogue tape because it is not, well, digital!! So you have to capture analogue tape in some digital format which Video Studio can then recognise and edit.

So what is the best capture format? Depends what equipment you have. I gave my own preferences, but ultimately said that with the capture device you have, it is best to capture analogue tape as digital mpeg-2, using settings that would make it as high a quality as is possible for that sort of capture, and also compliant with the international DVD standard... That way you minimise conversion which, with mpeg-2 will always involve some quality loss. So you capture your analogue video as digital mpeg-2, you edit it with the same properties, and then you burn it to DVD with the same properties.

Nothing grey about that! It's all bright, living colour!!!

[skier-hughes]

I don't know if the GL-2 can be used as a play-through device, though as it is a mini DV system, I suspect it could -- though you would need to consult the dealer on that or look at its manual.

The GL2 allows pass thorugh, so long as you set "av-in" in the menu options.