Beren (beren_writes) wrote,
Beren
beren_writes

Capturing VHS input ...

So I mentioned on Friday that we now have a capture box - it's the Xenta HD Capture Box, for those who are wondering. I've been using it all weekend now and it's not perfect, but seems to be doing an adequate job.

Be warned, if you have a degraded original, it might not be able to get a sync on it via supervideo or composite. For some of the tapes I was converting it was fine, for others it couldn't capture them properly because of a sync problem. We know it's the original source that is weak, because Rob connected it to a monitoring device and it was showing that the signal was coming in and out as the tape was playing. We have been able to get over the problem because Rob used to work for a company that made scalers and he has a couple of prototypes lying around, one of which can upscale the output so we can use HDMI and it gets over the problem, but without that the capture wouldn't work.

I have no idea why some of the tapes were good and some were bad, Wild Thing, Starcrossed and Rockula (which was an NTSC original) worked, but Nightlife and Spider-man (the 70s movies) just kept bouncing up and down and failing to sync. It's quite possible the last two are just a little more knackered than the first three, who knows :).

Since I know some people were looking into similar technology I thought I'd mention the issues I've had, just in case.

P.S. I had forgotten some great films, I will have to do proper reviews for them later. Nightlife is a vampire movie with Ben Cross and it might not have a huge budget, but it it brilliant.
Tags: info: technology
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