I Can Digitize Your Kate VHSs
shampistols69
Ulrich Grepel
Hi all,
most multi-system VCRs can playback the "foreign" format(s) in a way that some video digitizers do not understand. For example, a typical PAL VCR can playback NTSC, but not as NTSC, but as "PAL-60", that is, it has NTSC geometry (60 Hz, or rather 59.994 Hz or something like that, and 575 lines), but PAL color encoding. A typical analog TV will just work with the changed geometry (minor adjustments), and use the PAL color encoding (no adjustment) to display the image. At least some video digitizers will see NTSC geometry and will use NTSC color decoding, resulting in a black and white image. At least mine did about 15 years ago when I digitized my video material. To digitize my NTSC VHS video tapes, I needed a native NTSC VCR supplyable with 230V, which required ebay here in Germany. What I couldn't find was a native NTSC S-VHS VCR, so there were a couple of tapes I could not digitize...
Also, even for first generation S-VHS tapes (i.e. stuff you recorded yourself from analogue TV), the result will, most of the times, not be as good as what you can find on Youtube today.
The same is true for LaserDiscs (another ebay solution for me - having some LaserDiscs, but never before a LaserDisc player).
There were two "consumer" VCRs that did an actual format
conversion between PAL, SECAM and NTSC, including the geometry.
They did cost a fortune, but they did work. A friend of mine had
one of these, but that was prior to me having my video
digitizer, and was gone then.
There's only limited quality in analogue video. Kids today have no idea on what we had to suffer in ye olden days...
Uli
P.S.: I killed two Hi-8 video cameras while digitizing my private holiday videos. Mechanical deaths. Hi-8 has a quite high rate of dropouts, which, with my digitizer, caused image and sound to get asynchronous with each dropped frame, since sound continued, but it did not insert a blank image, but instead just shifted all remaining images "one frame to the front". That requierd retries and retries (and subsequent video editing) and lots of head cleaning of the video cameras, and after about 70 hours I was in the third camera...
P.P.S.: my digitizer, despite the mentioned problems, was
actually very good and not that cheap - for example it did have
a time base corrector that fixed problems on the tapes that
another digitizer I had before just gave up on...
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shampistols69
Ulrich Grepel
Hmmm... the service manual doesn't explicitly state what way NTSC playback works with that VCR. It is definitely not one of the two that actually converted the video completely, including resolution and FPS values, and there were not a lot of PAL TVs that could actually display true NTSC. Most could display PAL-60 converted NTSC signals however, so that's what most multi norm VCRs did.
It will depend on your digitizer whether, when seeing NTSC geometry (~60 Hz, 576 lines) it will insist on NTSC or assume and/or cope with PAL-60. Mine insisted on NTSC...
Just give it a try!
Uli
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shampistols69
When I digitized my NTSC tapes, selecting PAL-60 on digitizing software gave a black and white image. NTSC gave the full colors. I use AmarecTV software and IO Data GV USB2 capture card. The few versions of VirtualDub software I tried were a headache. I always had problems or the program would crash.
Ulrich Grepel
Hey, great, then your VCR indeed does something European PAL VCRs usuall didn't do: keep its fingers off the NTSC signal. And your digitizer knows about both, PAL-60 and NTSC. So it would even be usable with a typical European PAL VCR.
But maybe technology just evolved a bit since I made my experiences back in the late first decade of the current century...
Uli
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