Archiving videos, feel like I'm in a time machine.

Johnnytoxic · 1 Aug 2014 at 21:26

I'm archiving some old Betamax videos from the 80's, I suppose I was the first generation when video cameras were mainstream. I've never really seen video of my parents when they were kids.

I miss them days, seem 10x more happier back then. Very odd to be looking in on the past, you feel like your there again.

For the geeks, with storage being cheap I've gone with the lossless Largarith AVI codec at around 40 GB per hour. Why not with 4TB hard drives about. If some magical post processing comes in the future I'll have them for archive.

Destination · 1 Aug 2014 at 21:47

What resolution was betamax capable of carrying if you need 40Gb/hour?

Deleted member 651465 · 1 Aug 2014 at 22:02

40GB per hour seems crazy excessive! :eek:

Haggisman · 1 Aug 2014 at 22:04

Hikari Kisugi said:
What resolution was betamax capable of carrying if you need 40Gb/hour?

Indeed, that's got to be a higher bitrate than a 1080p bluray?

Monkeynut · 1 Aug 2014 at 22:14

I think the idea of lossless is to not butcher any more detail from the video than the tape already has.

Johnnytoxic · 1 Aug 2014 at 22:42

Monkeynut said:
I think the idea of lossless is to not butcher any more detail from the video than the tape already has.

Yes, always good to have the original capture. Deinterlacing scripts are always improving.

Pawnless Endgame · 1 Aug 2014 at 23:20

My parents were school teachers and they were lucky enough to use the school video camera at home during holidays. That was back in 1986, still unusual to have one back then. It took VHS tapes, and we used it well into the 1990s. After the Millennium, Mum had some software to record the tapes as files. After some editing, they wound up onto 4 DVD's worth of video. Mass-copied the 4 discs to hand out to the family

I've done something similar, but with a VCR with recordings of Top of The Pops and Chart Show on the parents' telly. The hardware is a SCART-to-USB interface. Plug the VCR into the PC using that, and the included capturing software will record the tapes as files.

Impressive eh? I've never owned a telly, yet the PC can play VHS, DVD and blu-ray

Rroff · 1 Aug 2014 at 23:26

My grandparents used to have a load of film on I think 8mm from their holidays in the 50s-70s (including Switzerland, Italy, Canada, etc.) really annoyed no one thought to preserve it as there was some real classic stuff.

Destination · 1 Aug 2014 at 23:47

Johnnytoxic said:
Yes, always good to have the original capture. Deinterlacing scripts are always improving.

I still do not understand, if the original media was 250 lines as per betamax, or 500lines as per extended betamax, then how can you deinterlace more than exists?
What style of cable do you use to pull this info?
At 40gb an hour, you are surely capturing lots of made up data, data that simple doesn't exist and can be erroneous, and thus lose you actual definition or preciseness in your copied media?

Lossless should be at the datarate of the original, not vastly higher than it?

Energize · 2 Aug 2014 at 00:36

Assuming a resolution of 250x332, 25fps and yuv16 colour encoding, 1 hour of uncompressed video would only be 15GB, so why you are storing them as 40GB lossless videos I don't understand quite frankly.

Hikari Kisugi said:
Lossless should be at the datarate of the original, not vastly higher than it?

Lossless will always increase the size of some content due to the nature of the algorithm. Data that is compressed using a lossless algorithm can actually be larger than the uncompressed video!

Johnnytoxic · 2 Aug 2014 at 01:13

Hikari Kisugi said:
I still do not understand, if the original media was 250 lines as per betamax, or 500lines as per extended betamax, then how can you deinterlace more than exists?
What style of cable do you use to pull this info?
At 40gb an hour, you are surely capturing lots of made up data, data that simple doesn't exist and can be erroneous, and thus lose you actual definition or preciseness in your copied media?

Lossless should be at the datarate of the original, not vastly higher than it?

Its analog so its not made up data. I'm capturing at 720x576.

Got to get my head around chroma, colour correction. Headache.

Energize · 2 Aug 2014 at 01:14

Capturing at dvd resolution makes no sense, you are creating artificial data from the upscaling of the video. Seriously, uncompressed video should be smaller than what you are capturing!

Johnnytoxic · 2 Aug 2014 at 01:31

THE VHS RESOLUTION:

If you search through the internet looking for information on the VHS resolution, you will find basically 352x240 at 29.967fps (Frames Per Second) for NTSC and 352x288 at 25fps for PAL-M. Yeah, right. You capture with that resolution and you get a video that looks like s***. So all those documents were wrong? No, they were inaccurate, or maybe just incomplete. The VHS video works with the interlaced system (not progressive), which means it draws every frame twice on the screen. In fact, every frame of an interlaced video is divided in two fields (the reason for this is a long story that comes from the first TV sets. Those two fields mean that every frame carries much more than just 240 or 288 lines of information. If you capture at 352x240 or 352x288 you'll be skipping every second field, which results in only half of the resolution..

That's why you have to capture at full frame DVD resolution to get both fields.

Surveyor · 2 Aug 2014 at 01:56

Assuming you're correct (and I've no idea if you are or not) shouldn't you be capturing at 352x480/576 pixels with an appropriate pixel shape to maintain the aspect ratio?

You're creating an extra 368 (720-352) horizontal pixels out of nothing.

Energize · 2 Aug 2014 at 02:34

Yes there are two fields per frame, but that only affects the vertical resolution not horizontal. So, 352x240 becomes 352x480. Capturing low res VHS or Betamax video at dvd resolution is creating artificial data.

To quote wikipedia,

"PAL VHS offers the equivalent of about 335×576 pixels luma and 40×240 chroma (the vertical chroma resolution of PAL is limited by the PAL color delay line mechanism)."

That is approx 34GB uncompressed using YUV16.

I would seriously just use MPEG 2000 or something for archival, yes it's slightly lossy but you won't notice it in such low quality videos and it's intraframe which allows easy editing and conversion.

Personally I just use h.264, because in reality I am not going to edit the movies in the future.

oxygene · 3 Aug 2014 at 23:48

Hey there, I've just attempted to archive some VHS for a relative and I've run in to a small issue. Maybe you could help me out

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18615558

Efour · 4 Aug 2014 at 00:01

You know you can stream porn these days right ?

Archiving videos, feel like I'm in a time machine.

Deleted member 651465

Deleted member 651465