Intensity Pro Capturing VHS Analog Tapes

JLK wrote on 11/7/2011, 11:04 PM
Hello. I have been using Vegas since vers. 3, now using vers. 10, soon to upgrade to 11. I am considering the purchase of a Blackmagic Intensity Pro card to capture and archive family VHS tapes in the best quality possible. My planned workflow is to capture S-video uncompressed with the Blackmagic capture software, then use vegas to render to a format that I can archive to archival grade DVD and/or BluRay while retaining the highest quality possible from my original capture. From there I plan to render to DVD and possibly "up-res" to BluRay to distribute to family members for playback at home.
I already own an ADVC-300 which works very well for most projects and has a time base corrector. However, it compresses to DV at 5 to 1.
My question is has anyone used the Intensity Pro to capture analog video to an uncompressed format that will suit my purpose? Can the captured uncompressed files be edited and rendered using Vegas Pro 9, 10, or 11? I understand that I will probably have to build a high speed RAID for this purpose. PC is new Gigabyte mobo, I7 2600 cpu stock speed, 16 gb ram, GeForce GTS 450, Pioneer BluRay burner, 500gb system drive, 2Tb data drive, eSATA 2Tb raid 1 for backup. OS Win7 Pro 64. JVC SR-V10U VCR, which claims to have built in TBC, but I'm aware that it may not be a true TBC. Thank you in advance for your opinions.

Jim K.

Comments

farss wrote on 11/7/2011, 11:55 PM
In my opinion you could be about to embark on a project that will achieve so close to nothing it doesn't matter.

Yes DV uses 5:1 compression. The clock frequency though is 13.5MHz to give a usable bandwidth of 6.25MHz which is the requirement for analog SD broadcast.

VHS does not come close to that, 3MHz in fact. On top of that a lot of "VHS" was already compromised before it was recorded, the very best commercial VHS I have seen looked significantly superior to the worst of the home movie efforts I have worked with.

I would say your biggest problem is encoding VHS sources to mpeg-2. VHS is noisy and jittery, both of those attributes are not good when using temporal compress, use the highest bitrates you can, consider using dynamic noise reduction of some form. Look for post by John Meyer on tips on how to clean up VHS after you have captured it. You can make reasonable improvements depending on what the issues are. I think your energy is far better spent working in this direction rather than considering uncompressed capture, there just isn't anything on the tapes to justify the expense.

Bob.
John_Cline wrote on 11/8/2011, 12:15 AM
Virtually all modern hard drives are fast enough to capture uncompressed standard definition files from the Intensity, which is what I used to do for maximum quality. (The files are technically not "fully" uncompressed, they are the same as the "Sony YUV" codec and are for all practical purposes, uncompressed quality.)

One feature of Cineform NEO is the ability to use their HDLink utility to capture SD and HD files directly to Cineform files in real-time using the Intensity. The data rates of even Cineform HD files are well within the capabilities of a single hard drive and there is no noticeable quality difference between the Intensity's uncompressed YUV and the Cineform files.

To my knowledge, the JVC S-VHS machines have a single line TBC, not a full-frame TBC, which is better than no TBC at all. In fact, I don't think that the ADVC-300 has a full-frame TBC either.
JLK wrote on 11/8/2011, 12:29 AM
Bob, John, thank you both very much for sharing your expertise on this subject. Your insights are always very informative. I believe I will buy the Intensity, as I am moving into HD along with my video preservation projects. Being able to monitor HD with this device at $189.00 seems worth the price for that feature alone. Thanks again.

Jim K.
JLK wrote on 11/8/2011, 12:53 AM
One last question. Any knowledge or experience using the Matrox MXO2 Mini with Vegas Pro?

Jim K.