Capturing old 8mm and VHS... some problems and questions

ccheaton wrote on 12/14/2003, 6:26 AM
Hello. I have two questions about capturing some video/film:

1) I have an old 8mm film (with projector) that I need to digitize and capture for editing in Vegas. I have never done this before, so I would appreciate any advice about how to do this. I have a Sony DCR-TRV70 camera that I would like to film it with. I'm worried about the difference between 24/29.97 FPS, among other things...

2) I have an old and degraded VHS tape that I'm capturing using a ADS Technologies PYRO Link capture device. When I first tried to capture the tape into Vegas, on a test run, it worked ok, dropping some frames here and there. I stopped it, reconfigured vegas to not show the preview of the capture, and tried again. Everything seemed to work fine, but the audio was not captured and a lot of frames were dropped. I then switched over to the ULEAD application that came with the capture device, to try to capture there. This time, the frames were dropped in the exact same spots on the tape that they were in Vegas, which leads me to believe that there are some more serious problems with the tape. The audio, on the other hand, captured without incident.

Vegas, then was unable to fully calculate the 'peaks' of the audio from the .avi tracks captured into the ULEAD program, claiming that the audio changed format about 1/2 of the way through each track. Bummer. The only way that I could find to get the video into Vegas was to then render out the entire length of footage that I wanted from the ULEAD program, and edit this rendered footage in Vegas (color correction, etc...) before rendering it AGAIN.

What's going on here? Why would Vegas not capture the audio? Is it the capture device? It is supposed to be an good low-to-mid-range capture device. Is it the degraded 17-year old VHS tape to blame? Any advice on how I can do this in the future, to avoid all of the trouble posed by this old tape?

Comments

ArmyVideo wrote on 12/14/2003, 7:16 AM

Have you tried running the VCR playing the tape to your TRV70 and using the camera as a DV bridge to bring the footage in via firewire? This should eliminate a lot of the capturing issues and dropped frames as well., and as native DV format, V4 will let you edit much smaller files, especially important if you'll be doing color correction. With 17 years of age on a tape, you won't get perfect results, but it should be much better than capturing it via an analog card.
As far as the audio problems go, the firewire connection should clean that up as well.. once again, not perfect, but much better than what you've experienced thus far.
To clean up the audio once you've gotten it into the system, I use Cool Edit Pro (now called Adobe Audition i believe). It allows me to pull in the audio from any video file and clean it up (remove hiss, pop, over-modulation, etc) and then send it back into V4 and marry it up with the footage. Doing this has saved more than a few tracks that I thought were ruined. I'm sure Sound Forge works just as well and has similar features, but since I've never used it, I'll only talk about what I know.
There were also some posts a while back that talked about restoring VHS footage using V4, but I couldn't find them doing a search.. anyone remember the posts?
johnmeyer wrote on 12/14/2003, 11:02 AM
Do a search in these forums on my user name and "VHS" for your VHS questions, and "film" for your film questions.

Also, for your film questions, you can go to this site:

8mm Film

and click on the "Telecine" link at the top of the page. Also, go to their forums and you will find all sorts of hints on how to best capture filme to video, using various techniques.
ccheaton wrote on 12/14/2003, 5:38 PM
Thank you very much! I really appreciate your help.