[HN Gopher] My Eight-Year Quest to Digitize 45 Videotapes
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My Eight-Year Quest to Digitize 45 Videotapes
Author : mtlynch
Score : 197 points
Date : 2020-10-20 17:08 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mtlynch.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (mtlynch.io)
| korethr wrote:
| I am wondering if the audio issues could have been fixed if the
| deck could have exported a timecode stream during capture. Have
| VITC[1] on line 20 of each frame, and the corresponding timecode
| as an LTC audio stream recorded alongside the audio. I don't know
| if it help with any drift from the audio capture and video
| capture clocks not being locked together, but it should reduce
| the amount of work after the fact to line the audio and video
| back up, as both streams contain a timestamp of the tape's
| position.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_interval_timecode 2.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_timecode
| holoduke wrote:
| Interestingly it is good to know that the quality of digitised
| video in the cloud (YouTube etc) decreases over time as well. The
| endless cycles of reencoding doesn't do a good thing to videos. I
| would even argue that my 10 year old YouTube videos decreased
| more than some of my 25 year old VHS tapes. So engrave your video
| bits in platinum to make sure it withstand time. Don't forget to
| add the decoder algorithm as well. It might not exist anymore in
| 30 years from now.
| rhizome wrote:
| This is essentially the argument -- I believe I read it from
| Steve Albini originally -- for the benefits of analog
| recording: digital files are always going to be reproduced at
| whatever bitrate and sampling rate the file was created with
| (not to mention the original recording), but analog equipment
| has improved greatly.
|
| A 78RPM record sounds orders of magnitude better than it did on
| the equipment that existed when the record was first released.
| Heck, even amplification means that a silent movie with a
| keyboardist or orchestra will sound better for everybody in the
| theater, not to mention saving the vocal cords of the
| intertitle card narrator (if applicable).
|
| Conversion equipment is always improving as well. The Super-8
| movies I had digitized 20 years ago should be reconverted again
| because they were ripped at 640x480, which was the style at the
| time. I'm not sure of the world of upsampling algorithms, but I
| bet those are improving as well.
|
| Digitized media will never look or sound better than they do
| now, and that's on consumer equipment. Ripping VHS with current
| hardware would undoubtedly result in a better image than 10
| years ago.
|
| Backing them up and preservation, on the other hand, is much
| easier with digital media.
| httpz wrote:
| I temporarily moved back to my parents' house durning the
| pandemic and digitizing childhood photos and videos is one of the
| things I was planning on doing while I'm here. Now I'm scared...
| tpmx wrote:
| I guess it was a bit simpler for people born in the 70s.
|
| For my part: Way back in like 2001 or so, I decided to digitize
| my family's collection of super-8 videos from when I and my
| sister grew up. I used a borrowed DV camera (with a firewire
| interface), the 70s projector and projection screen. Ended up
| with decent 480p quality. Used some ancient Linux/GTK-based
| editing tool to do the cutting. Ended up with what is now a 90
| minute, 700 MB .mp4 file. I'm happy that I ended up keeping the
| audio track, recording the noise from the projector and my
| occassional giggles
|
| It took about 1-2 days. Also I somehow broke that expensive
| borrowed DV camera (pretty certain it broke itself), so i paid
| like $150 to have it fixed.
|
| Anywy, ~two decades later: I'm so happy I did all of that!
| dyeje wrote:
| Wow, I'm sorry this was such a hassle for you. I think things
| have gotten better in the meantime. My father died last year and
| I decided to digitize our home videos to reminisce with.
|
| The capture part was easy enough, did it over a single weekend. I
| bought a camera that could play the tapes (~$100) and an Elgato
| Video Capture (~$80). Quality was as good as possible from the
| tapes and no audio issues. I also did not want to use a third
| party because I was concerned they might botch the job / lose the
| irreplaceable tapes / etc.
|
| The editing took about a month, I've never done video editing
| before. I just loaded up stuff in iMovie and grouped stuff
| together as it made sense to me. Most of the time was spent just
| watching the videos (I think I had around 60 hours of footage)
| which was enjoyable and necessary.
|
| In terms of sharing, I paid a friend who does video editing to
| make a supercut of all the best moments and I screened it at the
| family Christmas (many laughs and tears). I gave folks thumb
| drives of clips that were specific to them, but honestly I'm not
| sure if people even watched them. The movie format made it more
| digestible.
|
| If anyone wants the Elgato, I still have it and can give it to
| you for the cost of shipping. Also happy to refer you to my
| friend for editing needs, he's very affordable.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading.
|
| Your story sounds like the experience I _thought_ I 'd have.
| There'd be certainly a lot less difficulty if the equipment I
| got just captured accurately right out of the box.
|
| I agree with you on the value of making supercuts of the clips.
| I've made two video montages from my videos, and those are the
| clips I most often re-watch.
| fossuser wrote:
| I'd love to do that for my parents - and would be happy to pay
| for shipping (email in profile).
|
| Thanks!
| verytrivial wrote:
| The scene list spreadsheet strongly reminds me of how video
| editing was done in the 80s (in one Australian commercial editing
| company anyway): A pair of U-Matic machines under a pair of Sony
| Triniton monitors and a control 'console'.
|
| Plugged into the back of the machines, presumably via an eye-
| wateringly expensive I/O card, was an original IBM XT computer
| running something called, from memory, "Shot Lister" but perhaps
| that was a generic term. Shot Lister was monitoring the timecode
| from the tapes and would generate an EDL, or Edit Decision List,
| for the editor's work. Various manually entered reference IDs
| plus U-matic tapes frame numbers lead back to the original 35mm
| negatives.
|
| The EDL would be sent off, using a fancy new 3.5inch floppy via a
| courier, to another company to use the master negatives to
| "print" the final edit together.
|
| I remember someone, often the 'new kid' in the suite, would be
| tasked with manually writing down timecodes to clapper board
| references when the tapes arrived containing the rushes for
| whatever was being edited. Overall, remarkably similar!
| Jedd wrote:
| I've got an 'even worse' problem - a box of about 20 different
| 8mm (or similar) reel-to-reel tapes, containing family videos
| from perhaps as far back as the 1960s, but certainly much from
| the early 1970s.
|
| The tape tins themselves don't reveal anything about the media
| type or actual content.
|
| Apparently there are some cheap (~A$500) devices that let you
| convert these directly to digital, but reviews and blogs suggest
| highly variable results, probably based on how well the tapes
| have been stored.
|
| Paying someone to convert them is _hideously_ expensive, however,
| and is generally charged on a per-tape processed rather than
| viable output basis -- which is why most people stump up for a
| 'single use' device and spend the time. On the upside, at least
| there's no audio track for these things.
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| I would be curious to see how well a dslr with a remote trigger
| and a nema stepper motor could capture an 8MM reel. The quality
| would be really incredible if done right.
| shannifin wrote:
| Definitely something I'd love to get around to doing eventually!
| Although I was an aspiring film director when I was 10 so we've
| got plenty of horrible unfinished attempts of storytelling and
| stop-motion which I don't want to see again.
| peanutz454 wrote:
| Completely off topic. Am I a bad parent? I just saw a baby
| sucking on the keyboard, and the mother simply said very calmly
| "do you want to key in something?". I would have immediately
| started shouting "ughh nooo... don't suck on the keyboard. Bad.
| Bad." Now when I see my daughter shout back when she can simply
| reply back, I wonder if it is I who taught her that.
|
| :(
| bnj wrote:
| If you watch a video like this and notice things that you can
| apply to improve your own approach to your daughter, then that
| makes you a good parent.
| kenjackson wrote:
| So how did the professionals do the audio syncing? I feel like
| you built that part of the story up so much, and then left us
| hanging on how it was actually fixed!
| tmnstr85 wrote:
| I really appreciate the time that was spent thinking about the
| user interface and how to be the most cost effective. Metadata is
| a key defining factor. I endued up getting a VCR with HDMI output
| and a video capture card. While it works well for the VHS, we
| also had one of those super8mini's - thankfully I found the
| camera a while back, looking forward to plugging those in soon.
| Thank you for sharing!
| diebir wrote:
| Could you share the link to the place that digitized the VHSs for
| you?
| mtlynch wrote:
| The company was called EverPresent, but I don't recommend them.
|
| They:
|
| * Had a security flaw that made everyone's private videos
| trivially discoverable and left it open for six months after I
| notified them.
|
| * Failed to remove my files from cloud storage after I asked
| them to (especially troubling, given the flaw above).
|
| * Put my videos on a hard drive even though I asked them not
| to, and then tried to charge me for it.
|
| * Tried to charge me a different rate than initially quoted.
|
| * Send me marketing emails with no unsubscribe link (in
| violation of CAN-SPAM).
|
| * Robocall me with promotions a year later.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| I used one of these, it worked fine (no audio sync issues). This
| allowed me to finally sell my camcorder from 1998.. of course I
| sold it with the digitizer on eBay as a complete solution for Hi8
| tapes.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00WSAWZ1M
| zwieback wrote:
| My mom had a service digitize our Super 8 movies from the 60s and
| 70s, well worth it but of course due to the cost of the film back
| in the day those films were already pretty short and my dad
| edited them (with an actual splicing setup using glue and later
| tape). I interviewed my parents a few years ago and have some
| MiniDV tapes I need to edit, it takes me so damn long to edit
| video, though.
|
| I love that the authors' baby footage shows the vintage Apple ][,
| that's what I cut my teeth on.
| parliament32 wrote:
| Part of why this took so long is probably the author's
| unfamiliarity in working with video.
|
| >For example, I captured video from 20 tapes before realizing
| that the audio was slightly out of sync. Or I discovered after
| weeks of editing that I'd been exporting video in a format that
| doesn't support online streaming.
|
| Both of these are fixable with some ffmpeg incantations.
| mtlynch wrote:
| > _Both of these are fixable with some ffmpeg incantations._
|
| I knew that I could re-encode for web streaming, but doesn't
| each re-encode degrade quality? I didn't realize that I could
| have fixed the audio issues with ffmpeg, though.
| rom16384 wrote:
| In this case you could have used mp4box [1] to fix the audio
| synchronization without re-encoding.
|
| [1] https://github.com/gpac/gpac/wiki/MP4Box
| mtlynch wrote:
| I've never seen this utility before. Thanks for the
| pointer!
| parliament32 wrote:
| >doesn't each re-encode degrade quality
|
| Sometimes, it depends on what you were transcoding between in
| the previous steps, but it most likely doesn't matter because
| your original consumer-handheld-camera-and-cheap-tapes
| quality was trash anyway. Like another commenter mentioned,
| in cases like this you'd want one high-quality archive
| export, then transcode to one or a few lossy formats for ease
| of streaming.
|
| You'd fix the audio drift by changing the sample rate of the
| audio stream with asetrate: https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-
| filters.html#asetrate (or you could change the framerate of
| the video, either way)
| klodolph wrote:
| So... if you're archiving, you'd normally make one high-
| quality master copy and then create the lower-quality
| streaming versions from that. Unfortunately, there are often
| reasons that you'd want multiple versions for streaming.
|
| You also don't always need to re-encode for streaming. It
| depends on why the format couldn't stream in the first place.
| If you use the wrong container format for streaming (like you
| create an MKV file), then you can use -codec:v copy -codec:a
| copy and you're not re-encoding anything. On the other hand,
| if you got a yuv444 and you need yuv420 for streaming, that
| requires re-encoding.
| blibble wrote:
| no need to re-encode the video if you're only manipulating
| the audio, and audio is so small compared to video you could
| just have it lossless (or effectively lossless)
|
| amusing I made the same mistake when batch digitising tapes,
| did about 20 before realising the audio was out of sync
| klodolph wrote:
| That's true, but FFmpeg is a bit of a beast and the normal way
| to use it for anything but the most basic stuff is "post a
| question online and see if somebody answers with an FFmpeg
| command-line I can copy and paste".
| jlarocco wrote:
| Why do it yourself if you want to avoid learning how?
|
| ffmpeg has documentation, and people actually read it and
| learn to use it...
| klodolph wrote:
| You're asking the wrong person. I'm describing how most
| people use FFmpeg. It's easy to forget how frustrating it
| is to figure out what you want to do with FFmpeg just from
| reading the docs.
| pridkett wrote:
| This is incredibly delightful, thank you for sharing.
|
| Now that you have reasonably high quality versions of the videos
| you can start exploring other things to "enhance" the videos. If
| you want to make a parent cry, surprise them with a 1080p (or
| more) version of their 1970s wedding that was transferred from
| Super 8 tape. I spent way too long exploring the options and
| trying my own models there, in the end I did some hand tweaking
| and used Topaz for the rest. It's not perfect, but it's better
| than the Super 8.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| Yeah, I've been getting feedback that I should experiment with
| upscaling. It sounds interesting, but I haven't explored it in
| earnest yet.
| intrasight wrote:
| I did this about 10 years ago using a Canopus that I bought used
| on eBay. I've also loaned it out to other to do the same. It
| worked fine. I never edited the resulting digital movies. It's
| easy enough to just skip around.
|
| Next project is to digitize my grandfather's Super-8 film from
| the 1970s.
| interestica wrote:
| For those in the Toronto-Hamilton-Montreal corridor, I've been
| running everpixels.ca for a bit as a side thing (though it's
| kinda on pause). It's primarily focused on photo digitization for
| families - but I've also done a ton of tape media. I can help any
| local HNers that need access to hardware. (Or just some
| info/direction)
|
| Technology Connections (YouTube) does some good coverage of
| capturing/converting analogue video - hardware choices make huge
| difference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZC5Zr3NC2PY
|
| There's clearly a need/desire for this kind of stuff (though it's
| sad how many times I'm approached as someone is near death).
| Don't wait til that moment to save the stories and memories that
| you have.
|
| I've been back and forth about how much I want to dive in with
| this project. If anyone is local and really interested in some of
| it, drop me a line. There are some cool avenues I've touched -
| seniors, alzheimers, story capture.
| danhorner wrote:
| Do you scan 35mm slides? It turns out a family member needs
| this service. If you unpause it, my email is in profile.
| beervirus wrote:
| Someone in my family digitized a bunch of old home movies for
| Christmas one year. (I.e., he paid someone to copy them onto
| DVD.) We watched them for a little while on Christmas. I don't
| think anyone has thought about them since.
|
| Anyway, this rings very true:
|
| > With home videos, about 90% of the footage is boring, 8% is
| entertaining, and 2% is amazing. After you digitize the tapes,
| there's still lots of work to do.
| Thaxll wrote:
| Wow seeing Virtualdub bring back a lot of memories!
|
| http://www.virtualdub.org/
| robertoandred wrote:
| I recently had a similar mission. Used an old camcorder to
| convert the composite output from the VHS to a DV stream running
| over FireWire to a laptop. Then I recorded that with QuickTime
| Player and compressed with ffmpeg.
| khazhoux wrote:
| Any tips on cassette tape players? I bought a Jensen walkman on
| Amazon ($35) and it's super hissy but these cassettes are from
| 1990, so don't know how much is the player.
|
| I discovered that Izotope RX-8 Does a nice job of removing hiss,
| though at the expected cost in hi-freq content.
| klondike_ wrote:
| Nobody makes good cassette decks any more. You're better off
| buying a vintage deck from the 80s/90s. Newer decks don't
| support Dolby noise reduction which many tapes were recorded
| with back in the day, so they sound super hissy without it.
| steverb wrote:
| I used noise removal in Audacity to take care of tape hiss in
| some old recordings of my step dad that I digitized and cleaned
| up for my mom.
|
| This was all public speaking, so the noise removal worked
| pretty well. Not sure if it would be appropriate for music.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Unrelated: What are people using nowadays to rip DVDs in Linux?
| I'm getting sick of holding on to my old DVD collection. The last
| time I looked into this was over a decade ago and there was still
| some debate over which codec and container was the best. I don't
| even have a DVD drive now, so I'll have to buy one just to be
| able to rip them. Maybe it's better to just find them on BT...
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Handbrake, but if you don't have a drive, the answer is BT.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| I've been using MakeMKV[0] for years. It rips the raw video,
| chapters, etc., and doesn't re-encode, but I have enough space
| for it.
|
| [0] https://www.makemkv.com/
| haldora wrote:
| I always had good success with MakeMKV
| (http://www.makemkv.com), but it's only available on Windows
| and Mac. I'd then use Handbrake to convert into a more
| accessible format (maybe shoot for H265?).
| scrollaway wrote:
| MakeMKV is how I digitized my dvd collection as well. Felt
| right.
| genpfault wrote:
| > but it's only available on Windows and Mac.
|
| Oh? [1] has been working great for the past 5-6 years.
|
| [1]: https://www.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=224
| maxwellwhite wrote:
| I'm not sure if it's available or not for Linux but I've had a
| lot of success using Handbrake.
| pkamb wrote:
| > I host everything on a private media-sharing website that only
| my family can access, and it costs less than $1 per month to keep
| it running.
|
| I don't know if the author uses an iPhone, but I have personally
| enjoyed scanning old photo/video and then uploading it into my
| iCloud Photos account.
|
| If you edit the metadata the media shows up correctly in-place
| early on your chronological timeline. You can tag the location,
| and easily share.
|
| This has been the key to my photos archiving enjoyment. Get old
| digital camera pics off of old hard drives and servers and into
| the same private memories timeline that your smartphone uses.
| twooclock wrote:
| Congratulations for work well done and a good read too! I
| recently ripped some VHS tapes but still have to publish them.
| You mentioned static sites. What do you recommend? Are there any
| templates, sites etc. ? Thanks again!
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| I've used a few different static site generators over the
| years.
|
| Jekyll - Probably the most widely used, so whatever you're
| trying to do, there's a good chance it's documented somewhere
| online. It's Ruby-based, but I used it for years even though I
| can't read Ruby at all, and it was rarely an issue.
|
| Hugo - This is what I currently use to generate my blog because
| it's incredibly fast. There's a bit of a learning curve, but
| you probably wouldn't have to learn a ton about Hugo to make a
| simple site that lists video clips.
|
| Gridsome - This is a good solution if you already know Vue,
| because it's all Vue-based. Documentation is a bit spotty
| because it's kind of a niche tool, and development slowed down
| a lot in 2020.
|
| Gatsby - I briefly used it, but I found it very confusing as
| someone not familiar with React. Friends who like React seem to
| love it though.
|
| I unfortunately don't know of any templates for this type of
| project, though. Next time I get really frustrated with
| MediaGoblin, I might publish one. : )
| twooclock wrote:
| I used Hugo before, but you guessed it right - I was hoping
| for something ready made. Well I guess we'll have to do it
| ourselves... someday.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| How much of a headache would it have been to stretch or shrink
| the audio in, say, Audacity, so that it would play at the same
| rate as the video? Was it a constant rate?
| klodolph wrote:
| You'd probably want to do it in FFmpeg, because in order to get
| the audio in to Audacity and back out again you'd have to use
| FFmpeg anyway.
|
| I also get a massive headache just from using Audacity.
| david422 wrote:
| I went through a similar process trying to digitize a ton of old
| slides. Realizing that the crop wasn't quite right, some were
| flipped, some were skewed, or that dust had gotten on the slide
| creating artifacts. However, I eventually cut my losses and just
| decided I get what I get.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| I have no home videos from my childhood at all- my parents never
| showed any interest in buying a camera, and they weren't common
| in my circles anyway. I think there's exactly one video of me
| before I was 20-ish.
|
| That said, I do worry about all those family WhatsApp videos that
| my family shares and/or the videos that my siblings keep in their
| phones with no backup whatsoever. Maybe this post will finally
| convince me to put something together.
| PopeDotNinja wrote:
| FYI, you can choose to backup all of your WhatsApp media. All
| of my WhatsApp photos & videos get dumped into Google Photos.
| Works on Android or iPhone.
| ant6n wrote:
| The resolution is really bad though. Doesn't it mess with the
| camera backups, when there's low resolution versions backed
| up from the WhatsApp media folders?
| ruslan wrote:
| Well done! Yet, I think with properly recovered meta-data you do
| not need to splice long videos into separate clips, use ffmpeg to
| stream from a given file at given place. You keep just 45 .mp4
| files (one per tape) and a single .csv (or whatever format you
| store your meta-data in). Programming tricks will let you reorder
| or fix clips on-the-fly just by editing your meta-data. That's
| what I plan to do with my video archive :)
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| That's an interesting idea. If you're writing the whole backend
| yourself, it would work, but wouldn't you run into issues if
| you're using tools that expect individual video files (e.g.,
| utilities to generate thumbnails)? It's taking something that
| could just be static files (possibly even an entire static
| site) and introducing on-the-fly processing.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I would love to know what the pros use these days.
|
| I used to (2000 through about 2015 or so) do a lot of different
| captures, through not off of VHS. I have considered a BlackMagic
| setup for some VHS that is simply not available digitally ...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Past thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23311096
| mtlynch wrote:
| Author here.
|
| 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.
| flerchin wrote:
| Your insight to decouple editing from exporting along with
| using a csv as a data layer was really satisfying. Bravo.
| mtlynch wrote:
| It only took me about 7 years to realize it. : )
|
| 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.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| Congrats, and thank you so much for sharing this. I've been
| planning out how to build out a personal archive/website to run
| at home, just for my family and disconnected from the internet,
| and mediagoblin looks like the perfect solution for hosting
| media in a more convenient way than just folders and files.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| > _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)
| jeffbee wrote:
| For what it's worth, the timebase correction on a VHS deck has
| nothing to do with whether the audio is getting ahead of or
| behind the picture. If you think about the way VHS works, it's
| not possible for it to have audio-video sync drift. Reasons
| your audio was ahead/behind include that your capture device
| was recording the audio on a device with a free-running clock
| without reference to the video clock, or that the video capture
| device was dropping frames.
|
| Timebase correction just fixes up the sync pulses so they
| arrive in an orderly fashion, which improves the picture
| quality.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Oh, that's interesting. Thank you!
|
| 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.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| Last time I've seen time drift in a video file was from
| having the wrong frame rate in the video stream. A difference
| between 24 and 25 is rather obvious, but 23.97 and 24 fps
| might be hard to notice immediately.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Vaguely related, anyone who hasn't seen it, definitely go
| and watch Matt Parker's legendary explanation of why NTSC
| runs at 29.97fps:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GJUM6pCpew
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| That was a great video. I wonder why the frequency got
| changed when the original reason for the choice was the
| power network frequency. Wouldn't that cause all kinds of
| interference problems?
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I think that by the time they were designing the color
| TVs they could just put in a crystal that supplied the
| correct frequency rather than depending on the frequency
| from the mains power supply. Though that does raise the
| question of what that meant for the old B/W sets which
| were still locked to 30fps. Maybe they just got a very
| slight dead time at the end of every frame? You'd think
| they'd have problems with the broadcast signal being out
| of sync with the refresh signal in that case.
| codazoda wrote:
| I didn't read it all but I very much like the design, layout,
| and tone of the post. Nice job.
| betamaxthetape wrote:
| I'd be really interested to know what difference (if any) the
| S-VHS deck made compared to the regular one you were using.
|
| 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.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Honestly, I couldn't tell the difference in quality between
| the two VCRs, but I'm also bad at assessing video quality. I
| thought the quality on my professionally digitized videos was
| good, but videophile readers have given me feedback that it
| looks like near-amateur work.
| hexbinencoded wrote:
| Our family tried S-VHS players and VCRs back in the day, but
| ultimate found them to fall short of top-of-the-line VHS
| VCRs.
|
| 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.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Here's the most hackerly way to do this: rent a 10MHz, 10-bit
| or better data acquisition rig and hook its probe to the head
| amplifier of your VTR. Play all your tapes and capture the
| _raw_ tape signal to your computer. This will only require 45
| GB per hour, i.e. almost nothing. Process the signal after
| the fact, with perfect field /line sync correction, whatever
| audio compression/limiting/equalization you want, etc.
|
| 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.
| betamaxthetape wrote:
| There are in fact proof-of-concepts similar to what you
| describe[1] (this one is based off the Doomsday
| Duplicator[2], a hardware device used for Direct RF
| capturing off laserdisc players).
|
| 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.
|
| [1] https://github.com/happycube/ld-decode/issues/16
|
| [2] https://www.domesday86.com/?page_id=978
| jeffbee wrote:
| Nice. It really warms the ol' cockles to see that level
| of dedication to preservation. There already has been for
| years NTSC decoding in the gnuradio project, so doing
| this to VHS if you happen to have a USRP or similar
| peripheral might be almost trivial.
| nobleach wrote:
| Wow, this is taking me back to a former life of mine! The
| idea of a built-in TBC scares me a bit though. I guess
| it's not a big deal if you don't plan on mixing with
| other sources. I'd always prefer the shared black-burst
| generator in that case.
| Xavdidtheshadow wrote:
| Thanks for this detailed writeup! I've been staring down a
| similar problem and I'm really grateful you took the time and
| energy to do the legwork
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading! I'm glad to hear that the post is helpful
| in planning your digitization project.
| cowmix wrote:
| I'm on a 35+ year quest to digitize 350+ tapes... and the
| python lib you detailed is just the thing I need.
|
| thx!
| mtlynch wrote:
| Oh, awesome. Glad that it was helpful!
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| That was very insightful! As a Christmas present last year we
| paid someone to digitize all of my parents old tapes. It was
| awesome, but left off at the step of editing and I was
| disillusioned by the thought of trying to manually edit all of
| the clips. I might go back and try doing that now!
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| 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.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| Great posts, thank you. It must be a joy to hold so many hours
| of footage. Even if 90% may seem boring to you, think of the
| legacy you have created for your descendents. I have a total of
| 45mins of family tapes, of which around 5mins includes footage
| of my late father - the only footage of him which will ever
| exist. It is a yearningly small amount.
|
| 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?)
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| 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.
| rendall wrote:
| This was a really lovely read. Thanks for sharing those details
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading! I'm glad you enjoyed it.
| rootsudo wrote:
| To save time, he sent the tapes to a professional.
|
| I don't understand why you wouldn't record the audio and video
| stream differently - with an SVHS player, you could output
| s-video and capture that at better quality and then audio
| separately from the RCA lines. And then use virtualdubmod to time
| it properly, then curate.
|
| But then again, if it randomly got out of sync in recording, that
| could be annoying so maybe I don't fully understand the issue.
| realityking wrote:
| From what I understand of VCRs the S-Video output is only
| active for S-VHS tapes. Unless their recorder used those tapes
| it wouldn't have been an advantage - or even work at all.
|
| What he did do was use the 3 FBAS connectors for Stereo Audio
| and Composite video. Still subtle issues can crop up because
| analogue video is hard.
| codys wrote:
| S-Video output on SVHC players is active for both VHS and
| S-VHS tapes. VHS (normal) signal is not exactly the same as
| composite, the Y and C signals are encoded differently,
| meaning there _can_ be a benefit from only decoding VHS and
| not re-encoding into composite.
| codys wrote:
| Yes, it's clear that using a broken capture device or a system
| that doesn't properly sync the timestamps between video and
| audio captures (ie: driver issue) is the core issue.
|
| Just choosing a different capture device or finding one with
| less broken driver support would have been workable.
| yboris wrote:
| Selfish self promotion: I wrote software that helps you browse
| and preview videos (see screenshots & 'scrub' through them or see
| filmstrips of your films)
|
| _Video Hub App_ https://videohubapp.com/en/
|
| MIT Open Source: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| For someone who resisted hard using a professional service to
| digitize the videos out of privacy concerns, I'm _extremely_
| surprised they ended up create world-readable gcs buckets for
| files!
| mtlynch wrote:
| Are there legitimate risks to doing this?
|
| I was nervous about this part of the solution, but I can't
| think of any plausible scenario of unauthorized access given
| that I use a long, random bucket name, like
| mediagoblin-39dpduhfz1wstbprmyk5ak29.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| tl;dr programmer vs domain specialists, episode 523467
|
| This was a fun read, partly because I'm one such domain
| specialist and have answered questions on HN before about the
| weirdness of video encoding and all the things that can go wrong
| with it (which I also had to learn the hard way over a long
| period).
|
| As a general rule, when you're trying to grasp or automate
| something that's a little out of the mainstream, 90%+ of all the
| pain points are already well understood and even documented by
| other people - but you have to really go looking for that
| information. Reinventing the wheel takes 10 times longer than
| looking it up, and looking it up takes 10 times longer than
| asking people.
|
| The trick is to _not_ ask people how the wheel works, which will
| require a great deal of time on their part in educating you on
| the fundamentals, so they 'll often give you the brush-off or an
| abridged answer that it unhelpfully above or below your
| comprehension level. Instead, ask what they consider to be best
| reference material. You'll get a variety of answers; usually the
| more accessible material is a bridge to the harder material.
|
| Where video synchronization is concerned, the standards were set
| by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers; sync
| problems originate in a tweak to analog video frame rates (from
| 30 to 29.97) dating back to the introduction of color TV, which
| require _slightly_ more bandwidth than was already available for
| monochrome TV transmission.
|
| But the SMPTE documentation was written for people building
| equipment from scratch, and in a pre-digital era. The best
| documentation on recording and converting audio at different
| frame rates (for people who didn't wish to build their own
| equipment) was in an idiosyncratic spiral-bound manual available
| from only one store in Hollywood, and a text document from the
| website for Avid's Pro Tools audio engineering software
| respectively.
|
| For quite a few years most pro audio/video editing software could
| not handle such conversions properly because the programmers
| didn't understand the use cases, and for commercial and legal
| reasons were reluctant to study their competitor's materials.
| trying to explain the analog antecedents of the quirky frame rate
| standards to people whose only experience with video was digital
| was an absolute nightmare.
|
| (Avid + Pro Tools were the first movers in this space, and
| developed hardware and software for video editing for the _Star
| Wars_ movies. But as so often happens, their solution was
| horrendously expensive and professionals were locked into their
| platform, which lead to user interface ossification. As other
| vendors tried to enter the space, they were limited for years to
| 'semi pro' status because they couldn't handle complex use cases,
| even if they were better than A/PT in other respects.)
|
| In the 2000s I was a beta tester for Adobe and it took a full
| year of extended and repeated explanation to communicate the fact
| that editors were often handed material with the wrong frame
| rates because there were 10 or more places in the production
| cycle where an incorrect decision could throw everything off, and
| that that could happen every day of a many-day production cycle
| due to unforeseeable changes in personnel or location or
| equipment or service vendor.
|
| The vagaries of industrial production were very different from
| the idealized dependencies of software production, and it was
| hard to convince developers wrestling with already-arbitrary-
| seeming domain standards that it was not just a matter of 'fixing
| the inputs' without access to a time machine or unlimited cash.
|
| People who do a lot of reverse engineering seem to grasp this
| sort of problem much faster, but for obvious reasons there are
| very few of them on corporate development teams.
| muststopmyths wrote:
| The last time I had to capture VHS, Hauppauge made the best
| consumer capture cards. Just stick the S-Video/Coax into the card
| and capture with their application. No issues whatsoever.
|
| They still have a line of capture devices, but I have no current
| experience with them. Just throwing the name out there as an
| option to research in addition to some of the ones mentioned in
| other comments.
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