@Ove5868

Re the interlacing, when you export to MPEG 4, it should go out as Progressive so the interlacing should be gone. I'm not familiar with VideoEasy though so I don't know what exact controls you have there.

@Ove5868

Here's one of my examples of the wobbles and how to correct them (notice the ES-15 and EZ-48 videos have over-boosted whites).

The fix? Better VCR possibly, especially if it has a Line TBC; add a DVD recorder (has to be a specific Panasonic model, or some Sony models) into the workflow between the VCR and the capture stick.

A proper line TBC would be ideal but they're pretty pricey these days as it's dead technology but still needed/wanted.

@Ove5868

Hi and Welcome to the user to user forums.

I am surprised Al (AAProds) has not already jumped in with answers (it's more his thing than mine) but is probably waiting for me to give some inaccurate answer to correct 😂 but in the meantime to save you waiting,

First question.

When you say it plays back perfectly on a TV, is the TV in question an old analog TV?

If so you are never going to see a similar quality playing it back on a digital screen. For starters the analog TV is using a mesh screen to produce the 'pixels' which individually are much larger than the dots on even an HD computer monitor and the glow it produces when struck from the beam glows for longer.

PAL had an automatic colour correction whereas NTSC was manual and may need 'tuning'.

When you record the video you must get the interleaving correct at the recording stage or it will never show correctly as the interleave is 'baked' into the recording and altering the field order after in playback will only make matters worse.

So the order to record in whether it is NTSC or PAL should be Bottom field first. Whether that is 100% the case in all instances I can't say but that is the way it should be done.

The wavy lines to the sides probably never showed on an analog TV and would have spilled over the side edges of the screen. Same for the top and bottom of the screen. Some cropping may be in order. That effect is called overscan and can range from 5 to 10% of the picture size.

Other problems with analog tape include that often a tape will not play back as well on another player / recorder as well as it did on the machine it was recorded on. Misalignment of the tape across the helical scan head will have a degrading effect on the image. There can also be slight variations in the gap of the magnet in the head used to record and play back the information. The larger that gap is the more higher frequencies are lost.

As the tape gets older the it will lose some of the strength in the variation of the magnetic field flux and become more difficult to read without introducing noise.

Poorly stored tapes will suffer with oxide shedding and magnetic particles can end up on the wrong side of the tape..

Tapes stored from long periods of time will eventually bleed magnetic information from one portion of the tape onto the layer it is laying on top of. This is called 'Bleed through' and ends up giving a sort of slight ghosting of the image where positioning of objects within the frame have moved over a period of time.

Tapes that have not been carefully played to the end of the tape before storage will suffer more from the effects listed above than those either left ready to play or fast forwarded to the end as the winding of the tape will be uneven and over time cause some physical warping of the base material.

Even the best quality tapes would have an expected lifespan of around 50 years. Normally those would have been BASF Pro 50 tapes who were the only manufacturers to give out life expectancy predictions on their professional tape range. Most of the others could fail earlier. It is surprising to me more have survived.

Before using any tape that has been stored for long periods it should be fast forwarded and rewound before attempting to play it. This helps any possible loose oxide to stay where it should be and avoid 'stiction' where any loose oxide if pulled away slowing from the layer it rests on is more likely to stick to the back of the layer in front of it than the layer it was stuck to.

Other problems with transferring files may include.

Making sure the tape head (and guides where possible) remains unclogged of oxide deposits.

Sudden deposits while transferring the tape are always a possibility.

Making sure the signal path is as strong as you can make it. No oxidising of plugs or sockets etc.

Not coiling of cable runs and do not use extension cables in the signal path.

Keep all equipment way from any possible stray magnetic fields from large un-shielded loudspeakers or anything that could contain a mains powered electric motor, or even an old analog TV set.

If possible keep the recording bit rate as high as possible and use a non lossy codec such as AVI for use in further editing after the transfer.

I may have missed a few things as this is something I never had to do personally for my own use.

Ray.

@AAProds

Hi Al.

You beat me 😉😂.

Ray.

@Ove5868

Hi

. . . . Any idea what i am doing wrong ? . . . .

AFAICS you are doing nothing wrong, you do not see the 'wavy edges' on a TV playing 'analog' video because there is up to 5% of the image being cropped from the sides - this was necessary with analog TV's and is called overscan compensation. Modern digital TV's still use overscan compensation however it can be as low as 1.5 - 2% depending on the TV make/model.

AFAIK digital capture takes the whole signal with no overscan compensation.

I no longer have Rescue your Video tapes installed, however there is an option to control this under Video image optimization, Clipping

. . . . there also is a lot of "pink" noise on the screen . . . .

Is this mainly in the snow and very light areas of the screen?

If so this could be a colour balance bias towards red in the camera or your computer screen/monitor, which combined with the 'low resolution' of VHS tapes - which approximates to 310 × 576 being upscaled amplifies the 'pink' noise.

You should be able to compensate for this under Video image optimization, Color/tone in the program.

HTH

John EB
Forum Moderator

@CubeAce @CubeAce

When you record the video you must get the interleaving correct at the recording stage or it will never show correctly as the interleave is 'baked' into the recording and altering the field order after in playback will only make matters worse.

So the order to record in whether it is NTSC or PAL should be Bottom field first. Whether that is 100% the case in all instances I can't say but that is the way it should be done.

Sorry Ray! 😉

Most analogue VHS captures are Top Field First and always interlaced unless the capture device/software converts on the fly. I've never seen a BFF Analogue capture. The field order is set by the capture device and cannot normally be changed. In any case, it doesn't actually matter that much; as long as the order is known for export. Digital DV captures (actually transfers) are Bottom Field First and that is determined by the camera.

Interlacing is dealt with after the capture and is not baked in unless the export is messed up eg by resizing first.

MXV is, as is typical with Magix, a can of worms. It looks interlaced but the supposed Progressive MPEG-4 export stays "interlaced" (sort of) unless fiddling with the video properties is done before export.

On the left: a supposed Progressive MPEG-4 export of an MXV. On the right, the same export with TFF selected in the video properties:

@AAProds, @CubeAce, @Ove5868

Hi

. . . .  Bottom field first . . . . Most analogue VHS captures are Top Field First  . . . .

Both you are correct with qualification, VHS and most interlaced video are TFF, however, DV video is BFF.

The big question is was the video recorded on a DV camera and transferred to VHS, or a VHS camera - I should have asked this in my post.

John EB

@Ove5868 @johnebaker @CubeAce

AFAICS you are doing nothing wrong, you do not see the 'wavy edges' on a TV playing 'analog' video because there is up to 5% of the image being cropped from the sides - 

If you look closely, you will see that any "edge" waves are in the whole image, right across.

Modern digital TV's still use overscan compensation however it can be as low as 1.5 - 2% depending on the TV make/model.

My LG 55" (2020 model) has no overscan at all: I see all of the ugly VHS headswitching noise at the bottom as well fuzzy sides. I just crop it all away with Section (cough cough) but don't know whether Rescue your VTs has that function.

@Ove5868

Here's one of my examples of the wobbles and how to correct them (notice the ES-15 and EZ-48 videos have over-boosted whites).

The fix? Better VCR possibly, especially if it has a Line TBC; add a DVD recorder (has to be a specific Panasonic model, or some Sony models) into the workflow between the VCR and the capture stick.

A proper line TBC would be ideal but they're pretty pricey these days as it's dead technology but still needed/wanted.

Thanks AAProds ! Really appreciate the QUICK feedback ! And thanks for the pointers. Did some quick research on HW TBC devices and it seems most are from the Pentium 3 era and very hard to come by. Mr. Moore would say that since then CPU performance has increased by a factor 2^22 so my question : are there any SW TBCs out there ?

@Ove5868

Hi and Welcome to the user to user forums.

I am surprised Al (AAProds) has not already jumped in with answers (it's more his thing than mine) but is probably waiting for me to give some inaccurate answer to correct 😂 but in the meantime to save you waiting,

First question.

When you say it plays back perfectly on a TV, is the TV in question an old analog TV?

If so you are never going to see a similar quality playing it back on a digital screen. For starters the analog TV is using a mesh screen to produce the 'pixels' which individually are much larger than the dots on even an HD computer monitor and the glow it produces when struck from the beam glows for longer.

PAL had an automatic colour correction whereas NTSC was manual and may need 'tuning'.

When you record the video you must get the interleaving correct at the recording stage or it will never show correctly as the interleave is 'baked' into the recording and altering the field order after in playback will only make matters worse.

So the order to record in whether it is NTSC or PAL should be Bottom field first. Whether that is 100% the case in all instances I can't say but that is the way it should be done.

The wavy lines to the sides probably never showed on an analog TV and would have spilled over the side edges of the screen. Same for the top and bottom of the screen. Some cropping may be in order. That effect is called overscan and can range from 5 to 10% of the picture size.

Other problems with analog tape include that often a tape will not play back as well on another player / recorder as well as it did on the machine it was recorded on. Misalignment of the tape across the helical scan head will have a degrading effect on the image. There can also be slight variations in the gap of the magnet in the head used to record and play back the information. The larger that gap is the more higher frequencies are lost.

As the tape gets older the it will lose some of the strength in the variation of the magnetic field flux and become more difficult to read without introducing noise.

Poorly stored tapes will suffer with oxide shedding and magnetic particles can end up on the wrong side of the tape..

Tapes stored from long periods of time will eventually bleed magnetic information from one portion of the tape onto the layer it is laying on top of. This is called 'Bleed through' and ends up giving a sort of slight ghosting of the image where positioning of objects within the frame have moved over a period of time.

Tapes that have not been carefully played to the end of the tape before storage will suffer more from the effects listed above than those either left ready to play or fast forwarded to the end as the winding of the tape will be uneven and over time cause some physical warping of the base material.

Even the best quality tapes would have an expected lifespan of around 50 years. Normally those would have been BASF Pro 50 tapes who were the only manufacturers to give out life expectancy predictions on their professional tape range. Most of the others could fail earlier. It is surprising to me more have survived.

Before using any tape that has been stored for long periods it should be fast forwarded and rewound before attempting to play it. This helps any possible loose oxide to stay where it should be and avoid 'stiction' where any loose oxide if pulled away slowing from the layer it rests on is more likely to stick to the back of the layer in front of it than the layer it was stuck to.

Other problems with transferring files may include.

Making sure the tape head (and guides where possible) remains unclogged of oxide deposits.

Sudden deposits while transferring the tape are always a possibility.

Making sure the signal path is as strong as you can make it. No oxidising of plugs or sockets etc.

Not coiling of cable runs and do not use extension cables in the signal path.

Keep all equipment way from any possible stray magnetic fields from large un-shielded loudspeakers or anything that could contain a mains powered electric motor, or even an old analog TV set.

If possible keep the recording bit rate as high as possible and use a non lossy codec such as AVI for use in further editing after the transfer.

I may have missed a few things as this is something I never had to do personally for my own use.

Ray.

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks for the quick response and education. To answer the question what TV I used : A Samsung 55" ... 3 years old. The picture, as expected, was grainy but it didn't have the "flagging" or waviness to it, nor was the "pink noise" showing on the screen. It also looked like the two half pictures were reassembled correctly. Though i don't know for sure if the TV went into "progressive" mode. Does that mean that the TV does TBC ? And if so, can i grab the output from that instead of inserting a DVD Recorder into the workflow ?

@Ove5868

Hi.

So basically a modern flat panel screen.

This is where @AAProds experience far out-ways my own. My main background is with analog audio rather than video although I kept up with the tape production techniques in general. I expect him to know that answer. Sorry.

Ray.

@AAProds

HI Alwyn,

. . . . My LG 55" (2020 model) has no overscan at all: I see all of the ugly VHS headswitching noise at the bottom as well fuzzy sides. . . .

Does the TV not have a setting for changing the overscan setting?

. . . . don't know whether Rescue your VTs has that function . . . .

I mentioned this and the colour correction in the same comment you quoted from.

@Ove5868

Hi

. . . . but it didn't have the "flagging" or waviness to it, nor was the "pink noise" showing on the screen. It also looked like the two half pictures were reassembled correctly. . . . .

Assuming you mean when playing from the VHS recorder, the TV would be visually better, they have far better de-interlacing filters than computers do, they also have better upscaling capabilities as well.

John EB

@Ove5868

To answer the question what TV I used : A Samsung 55" ... 3 years old. The picture, as expected, was grainy but it didn't have the "flagging" or waviness to it, nor was the "pink noise" showing on the screen. It also looked like the two half pictures were reassembled correctly. Though i don't know for sure if the TV went into "progressive" mode. Does that mean that the TV does TBC ? And if so, can i grab the output from that instead of inserting a DVD Recorder into the workflow ?

I think the main advantage a TV has is that it's not converting the video into a digital stream for saving on a PC, it's merely reading the signal and displaying it. That is why VCRs seem to display video better on the TV; I don't think they have TBCs, per se. As JohnEB says, TVs have good de-interlacers and so yes, it is being displayed in Progressive. I also agree with his comment re upscaling; my TV does a great job at upscaling video.

As for recording from the TV, unless your TV has video out, I doubt it will be possible.

@johnebaker

John,

Does the TV not have a setting for changing the overscan setting?

I don't know. There would be no point in masking the edges anyway because you can't mask them out on any of the computer players, and of course, the online streamers like YT and FB. I prefer to make the file itself look correct, then people don't have to worry about fiddling with overscan areas. To that end, if Magix would fix the Section bug I'd be happy!

Both you are correct with qualification, VHS and most interlaced video are TFF, however, DV video is BFF.

I did say that in my post before yours.

@AAProds

Hi

Alwyn

. . . . I did say that in my post before yours. . . . .

So you did, my apologies.

John EB