Philips VCR

There's a blast from the past. The first color VCR I ever saw was a Philips VCR circa 1980 or even a bit earlier. I am not sure that it was either VHS or Beta.

At my then employer (an ad agency), I had been using AMPEX VR7000s and then the later color AMPEX versions (I can't remember the model number) - complete with crash editing in both cases.

At the time, the Philips color VCR was a true revelation in technology.

Unfortunately, your captured file comes with the errors baked in. It can't be reversed. TBC is done in realtime.

The solution "would be" to recapture with a TBC capable hardware device, but I realize that isn't possible.

@johnmeyer has done some really good work with frame-by-frame alignment. May want to search some of his old posts.

Hi,

when I look at the mpg video from the record on computer with my hardware video capture card it is obvious that the sides are "fluffy", ie the scan lines are there in their full length, so it does not to my way of thinking compute that this is impossible. It is "advanced" because it also has to fix audio speed variation, but if you can align the beginning of scan lines with  hardware then that must also be doable with software.

Mind you, I saw the original VCR cassettes when I made a safety copy of them in 1985 before returning them, the last thing that VCR machine did, it failed on a retry of a tape that I had tried and skipped as unplayable.

The original video was excellent, except that a certified TV-technician had been recording it and he had lighted up the lectures as if for plumbicon. The VCR system was for reasonably available light in normal rooms. IF video could have bypassed the RF output of the VCR and the RF input of the VHS then  there had been a much better result, the most overlighted of course clipped RF video. But that is an other tale. I did then the best I could do within my means. And it has not been without a reward, learning a lot about audio and video salvage.

The video I generate now will not be correctable as I clip to nice clean edges, but I still have the original salvage of the VHS and I still have the VHS tapes, most of the fluffyness of the edges may be from that machine, even though there are obvious errors from damaged VCR cassettes. Except for the idiotic pancaking in the cassettes to make them housewife friendly it was a good system.

Thanks both of you, it is more uphill than I had expected, some things are like that …. but trying a hardware tbc on the VHS copy would be possible … hmmm …. a new large frontier of ignorance opens ….