Suggestions for digitizing and upsampling VHS?

[Tuthmose]

Hey all,

I’ve got a fair number of old VHS tapes with material I still use for my history class. I update to DVD or HD when I can, I have some high quality stuff which was never available in newer formats or given more recent coverage.

I’m looking for advice on how to digitally capture the material, clean it up, and upsample it as much as possible. What sort of analog-to-digital equipment and setup would yield the best possible quality, given a teacher’s budget? I'm sure this probably isn't rocket science, but it is outside of my realm of experience. Rather than blunder about and waste time and money, I figured it wouldn't hurt to ask for advice.

Regarding upsampling, I know enough to know that I don’t know squat. My Onkyo AVR upsamples analog material I play *through* it, so I know such can be done within limits. Does there exist a reasonably-priced computer program or analog-to-digital capture device that can do the same thing? I’m under no illusions that I can make a VHS tape into HD or anything close, but I am looking to improve the quality enough to make it presentable when I throw it up on a 96” wide screen. The AVR does a decent job in direct play; how can I do this when digitizing the material?

Any suggestions are, as always, appreciated!

 

[sharknice]

The quality bottleneck is probably going to be the VCR outputs. You can get a USB capture device with just about any inputs and they usually come with some sort of recording software, or you can use about any video editing program to record from it.

So basically you just hook your VCR up to the USB capture inputs, hit capture, and play the VHS. It'll probably be 640x480 resolution. I would probably just let whatever is playing the videos do the scaling itself, I doubt you'd get much improvement scaling it and re-encoding it.

 

[michalrz]

Sister had a photo shop once and bought a dedicated Panasonic VHS->DVD copy machine.

I have already seen good VHS playback on expensive units in the past, but I was blown away by the quality provided by that copier. I mailed her about what exact model that was, I'll let you know when I find out.

Edit: she sold it and didn't write down the model so - apologies

 

[Tuthmose]

Thank you both, and thanks for trying to get that info, Michalrz, even if it didn't work out.

From what I've come across, it seems I'm best off having whatever is doing the capture do upscaling along the way, rather than play with the resulting digital file with software. So if anybody has suggestions as to a high-quality capture device, be it USB or internal card, I'm all ears. There seem to be a ton of them out there, most pretty cheap, but so far I've found no decent comparative reviews indicating which may do the best job. I'm assuming that the majority of the sub-$50 units I see aren't going to give me the quality I want (though I could be wrong, I guess . . .)

 

[michalrz]

Thank you both, and thanks for trying to get that info, Michalrz, even if it didn't work out.

From what I've come across, it seems I'm best off having whatever is doing the capture do upscaling along the way, rather than play with the resulting digital file with software. So if anybody has suggestions as to a high-quality capture device, be it USB or internal card, I'm all ears. There seem to be a ton of them out there, most pretty cheap, but so far I've found no decent comparative reviews indicating which may do the best job. I'm assuming that the majority of the sub-$50 units I see aren't going to give me the quality I want (though I could be wrong, I guess . . .)

No problem.
I'm wondering where your bottleneck will indeed be. The magnetic part, the magnetic->electric part or the frame grabber.
I would stab in the dark that with ~500 lines, a USB grabber would suffice. I'll take a look at some models out of curiosity if I find the time.

My parents, when they were editing family VHS videos, also used a dedicated little analog 'video enhancing' box in the middle. It had a ''gain" dial I remember, or a cut-off dial. (it was 1995).

I think step I is deciding on how to output the VHS signal. I googled some and apparently component (not the yellow RCA composite) Y/C would be the better choice over S-Video.

You'll probably want to have some rubbing alcohol (NON salicylicum) handy and do a ritual of cleaning the head and adjusting tracking between each tape. Old bad tapes can leave debris on the head after only one playthrough.

 

[Verge]

You're talking 240 250 lines of resolution, going to be very difficult to attempt to upscale that.

 

[Tuthmose]

I certainly don't have expectations that are too high, Verge - 1080p is will never be (or anywhere close). You can't enhance what isn't there. In most cases, I am just sourcing newer formats or newer replacement material. Some of my old classics, though, aren't available any other way, and are content-rich enough for me to make the effort to save.

That said, the Onkyo AVR I bought for the classroom does make the tapes look measurably better than direct output to the projector. Continuing to do things that way isn't a viable option, though, as the tapes are getting mighty "long-in-the-tooth" and won't last. I'm looking for some way to get that level of improvement, at least, in a digital file with a shelf-life longer than me that I can just play from the computer.

Perhaps an absurdly simple question, but should I perhaps just play it though the Onkyo (which does, btw, allow me to connect VHS via component video) from a good TBC-equipped VHS player and then capture its output via hdmi? Could it be that simple, or is there something equally simple that I'm missing in my ignorance?