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Automating our home video imports
- suchoudh 10mo agoi do not have videos but i do have audio cassets which needs conversion to digital. If someone knows a faster and good way pls share. thanks
- o11c 10mo agoI do not have any good advice, only pain. It turns out that a lot of old tape players have either failed completely or else add excessive background hissing. Most tapes don't record all the way to the end so you will have to cut it digitally regardless.
- pjc50 10mo agoI don't think there's going to be a better way than "find high quality player and decent capture device (e.g. Behringer), then press play a lot". It's possible that a truly dedicated process would capture off the tape head and then de-Dolby in software, but ultimately: it's a tape.
- actionfromafar 10mo agoIf you want more pain, you can correct for wow and flutter after capturing. https://github.com/HENDRIX-ZT2/pyaudiorestoration https://github.com/HENDRIX-ZT2/pyaudiorestoration Key IMHO is "Speed matching to hum frequency". There are also commercial products which does similar things. https://www.celemony.com/en/capstan https://www.celemony.com/en/capstan https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/digitizing-tapes/62996/2 https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/digitizing-tapes/62996/2
- Jnr 10mo agoHow I digitized my family VHS tapes: * I borrowed a good quality VHS player with SCART connector because it sends RGB in separate channels, improving quality considerably. Don't use the single channel composite video. * Then I bought a cheap SCART to HDMI convertor and used a borrowed HDMI capture card. * I recorded it with OBS studio and the resulting video looks very good. So my total costs were about 20$ (for the adapter).
- reddalo 10mo agoMe too, but I've used a good VHS player with HDMI output. So it's one transformation step less, and maybe the end quality is the best possible (I hope).
- pjc50 10mo agoThis also worked for me. Crucially, the cheap composite capture devices are rubbish and have terrible drivers as well, while the cheap HDMI capture + OBS Just Works. There is the ultimate solution https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode , but that requires modifying your VCR.
- actionfromafar 10mo agoThe best solution for "normies" is to get a Panasonic DVD player with HDD recording ability. That thing has a circuit which synchronizes all scanrows, i.e. it completely removes all tearing of the image. Then proceed with something to digitize the analog output from SCART2. A couple of models with this feature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XW_-16Vo4E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XW_-16Vo4E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaH73rhBHbk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaH73rhBHbk
- toomuchtodo 10mo agoThis was helpful, thanks for sharing. Would you have a specific model recommendation if cost is not a concern and the use case is long term archival?
- actionfromafar 10mo agoWith these Panasonics, you either get the right model numbers, or. Tearing or no tearing. The bigger difference is the VCR (you need one of those, too) and the capture device. The capture device is a whole thing. See for instance Technology Connections on YouTube. Depending on what you then capture with, you may need to attenuate the video signal with a potentiometer if the image is too bright and washed out.
- mentalgear 10mo agoImportant archival work - much appreciated! However some links on the page are not working. Also, it seems like the author has made a Web app to make conversion easy, but I don't see a repo link or otherwise a way to access it.
- icyfox 10mo agoSince the webapp is pretty opinionated to my setup (ie. linking against AVFoundation, using MPS for inference, always capturing an image after import) I didn't originally think it would be that useful to open source. Happy to do so - are you looking to get something specific out of it?
- duggan 10mo agoI had a similar set of tapes, and ended up collecting a chain of connectors – firewire cable, firewire to thunderbolt2 adapter, thunderbolt2 to usb-c. Instead of cobbling together an impressive array of tools though, I just got a trial of Final Cut Pro and pulled out everything with that. You can get what I think is a three month trial? Anyway, it was plenty for this one time effort of digitizing old Hi8 tapes. I think I did end up using Handbrake to take the raws down to a reasonable size to give to family members, but the raw footage and project files I stuck on a couple of 1TB Sandisk drives to keep in physically separate backup locations.
- Clamchop 10mo agoNo need for FCP, as iMovie can still capture DV streams from Firewire. I'd expect they both use the same implementation. However, Apple has removed Firewire support entirely from macOS Tahoe so none of these solutions will work on Mac going forward.
- duggan 10mo agoI think it was needed for retaining the original aspect ratio, and capturing in ProRes, but maybe there's a workaround there that I didn't find.
- mansandersson 10mo agoGot me thinking of a previous post regarding digitalizing VHS tapes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24839848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24839848
- ErroneousBosh 10mo agoIf you have a lot of Video8 or Hi8 tapes to digitise, get a Digital8 camcorder. It will most likely play them back quite happily and emit DV over its Firewire port. Digital8 is just DV on a different tape! I still use DV/DVCAM tapes because I like shooting with old cameras, and I capture the same way I have for about 25 years when I used a VX2000 to shoot DV for a commercial digital streaming company that did all sorts of training videos. Cheap crappy PCIe Firewire card (back in the day it was PCI, but no-one has that now), and dvgrab to get a raw DV stream off tape, then ffmpeg -i dvgrab-001.dv -c copy whateveritscalled.avi to rewrap it in something the editing software can read. These days I use DaVinci Resolve on Linux, in the olden days I used Premiere 5 on Windows 2000. Even back then I used to capture on Linux and then bring it into Windows 2000 because only Linux had reliable Firewire support.
- actionfromafar 10mo agoCan vouch for this trick - Digital8 cameras with Firewire is perfect transferring analog Video8 / Hi8. The analog to digital path in the Digital8 cameras is way better than what you can likely scrounge up yourself. Can be expensive to get but if the camera doesn't break during use you can resell them easily.
- ErroneousBosh 10mo agoI've ended up with three of the damn things, so if you are sufficiently desperate to dub your 8mm tapes that you're prepared to trail all the way up to NE Scotland I'd be happy to oblige.
- icyfox 10mo agoI bought a Sony TRV120 10+ years ago, back when I was doing this conversion project for the first time. It's built like a tank and still works today. At the risk of being smited by professional archivists, I'm willing to wager that 99.9% of people can't tell the difference between a $5k archival rig and one of these higher quality camcorders. At this point it really feels like the biggest inhibiter to good quality digitization is the decaying of the tape versus the archival setup. That said - for anyone with the time, patience, and soldering abilities I would love a more proper A/B test with RF signal capture software encoding. Something like this: https://rastrillo.ca/digitizing-video8-tapes-with-vhs-decode/ https://rastrillo.ca/digitizing-video8-tapes-with-vhs-decode...
- donclark 10mo agoWhat is the value for meaning for keeping home photos or videos? Does anyone provide meta tags, detailed information or narration? How is the photo or video meaningful unless you add your detailed memories to it for others to understand?
- actionfromafar 10mo agoIf the relevant relatives are still around but don't have the ability to play tapes anymore but want to watch them from time to time, you don't need any of that.
- icyfox 10mo agoMost of my tapes did have pretty detailed narration and date overlays written directly to tape. But even without narration I still had luck doing basic event summarization and facial recognition of family members to build the tags.
- dangus 10mo agoOP definitely used $4,000 worth of expertise plus a decent amount of time, despite automating the process. It wouldn't have been crazy to spend $4,000 to have the professionals do it, so long as they produced a reasonably equivalent high-quality result.
- badlibrarian 10mo agoGood lord the misinformation here. VHS is a composite signal on the tape itself. Composite for sake of this thread means black and white detail plus color information. S-VHS has higher bandwidth in the luma (detail) but the same limited color bandwidth. And there are two audio standards. But there is no "RGB out." At a minimum you want a device with S-Video out (it keeps the two signals on separate wires). You also need a time base corrector. These come in two forms. One is line-based sometimes built into DVD players. This is how Jason Scott at Internet Archive does it and it's wrong. The other form of corrector requires a separate box and corrects each frame in full. Many boxes claim to be time base correctors but are not. They are "synchronizers" or amps. Don't buy until you understand the differences. There are two time sources (not really clocks) in a VCR. The first is physical tape wobbling and stretching over a head that's spinning far faster than seems possible. Line TBC is a tiny buffer that reconstructs the sync of the luma on each line. The other timing source is the overall signal sync. A proper TBC reconstructs this overall sync on a frame by frame basis and presents something sane to the capture card. Without it you'll drop frames silently, audio falls out of sync, and all the other crap that happens when you try to watch video older than an iPhone. Consumer video capture is total crap and you won't see it until you try to encode, edit, or watch it on a different device. And then you'll be very confused working back to the original problem. But follow this careful path where you actually capture a clean, proper signal and feed it into even the cheapest Blackmagic box and you're good. ChatGPT will walk you through this and seems to know more about proper ffmpeg settings than the developers themselves or 30,000 conflicting StackOverflow messages on the topic.
- skinner927 10mo agoYou seem to know what you’re talking about. Could you recommend any devices that fit the requirements you outlined?
- badlibrarian 10mo agoVHS-Decode did get a mention in these comments previously but probably beyond the reach (or patience) of even most hackers. But good information on decks and theory: https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode/wiki/ https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode/wiki/ In the (original) spirit of this site, where people get curious and go off and solve impossible problems, I can point to this guy who gets it. He rants better than I do. https://www.reddit.com/user/TheRealHarrypm https://www.reddit.com/user/TheRealHarrypm Read on for my rant if you care. The last useful decks were built 25 years ago. Even then there's acres of bad advice on the internet, specifically around prosumer decks with built-in TBC that isn't sufficient to provide a proper signal to a modern video capture card. So find any S-VHS deck that actually runs well, S-Video out into a external TBC. Blackmagic owns the cheap-but-great category for capture. Then ffmpeg to suit your storage budget. Beyond that, things are so screwed up online around preservation technology and knowledge that my advice is to seek the services of a professional if the material is important. Or go ahead and DIY if you're just doing amateur stuff or you're a hoarder trying to justify your conditions. But try to refrain from posting your secret sauce; it likely isn't. Organize and post the videos instead. Most won't, because they know they look like shit and they can't handle the feedback. I just did a quick Google search and found this on a formal preservation website: "This means that S-VHS tapes are playable in VHS decks but VHS tapes are not playable in S-VHS decks." https://psap.library.illinois.edu/collection-id-guide/videotape https://psap.library.illinois.edu/collection-id-guide/videot... Exactly backwards. I don't think I've ever read an article about analog media of any type on the internet that didn't have me screaming at the screen.
- skinner927 10mo agoIs that webapp shared anywhere? I can’t find a link in the article.
- Breakthrough 10mo agoAwesome to see this! I actually wrote PySceneDetect, was great to see it getting some use here. Would you be willing to share what parameters you were using? I'm curious why the accuracy was so low. PySceneDetect only uses basic heuristic methods right now so it does require some degree of tuning to get things working for certain data sets. Your post inspired me to look into maybe integrating TransNetV2 as a detector in the future!
- icyfox 10mo agoNice to see you on here! I used the ContentDetector with a threshold of 27.0 and otherwise default parameters. Realize I could have done a grid sweep to really hone in on a good param range, but because I had only one input video labeled I wanted something that would work well enough out of the box. I imagine this dataset is rather... heterogenous. If you happen to know a better apriori threshold I would be happy to re-run the analysis and update the chart.
- Breakthrough 10mo agoIf you're willing, could you try using AdaptiveDetector? It should have better defaults for handling fast camera movements a bit better. The threshold values themselves can be tuned if you generate a statsfile and plot the result, but that can sometimes be tedious if you have a lot of files (thus the huge interest in methods like TransNetV2). Glad to see the real world applications of those in action. You can always just increase/decrease the threshold by 5-10% depending on if you find it's too sensitive or not sensitive enough as well. Thanks for the response!
- icyfox 10mo agoAdaptiveDetector definitely did a better job, will append these new stats to the post: precision 0.397, recall 0.727, F1 0.513, mean temporal error 0.307 s
- rexysmexy 10mo agoI'm still sitting on some 8mm film that my grandpa shot, and even some of the commercials he worked on. Still trying to find a reasonable way to digitize them. Also multiple boxes of slides, I know you can buy the scanners (I had one). Wish there was a cheaper automated way hahaha