Despite a long career in IT I'm still so impressed.

[Tom Speirs]

I built my first HTPC and arcade machine when we were still firmly in the CRT era and Amazon just sold physical books and nothing else, We just rolled out Windows 95/98 at work and patched for Y2K physically.

Yesterday, I purchased a 4k HDR HDMI new capture card for just $200. I ordered it at 11AM and it was delivered  the same day.

In many ways I love the world we live in now...

[tthurman]

Agreed, but in many way things were better in the old days.  

My earliest games and PC shopping online experience was via Cyberian Outpost, and it was amazing to order a game one day and have it on the door step the next day after work, and this predated Amazon Prime and the like by what, 15 years? 

Still, while instant satisfaction has enabled us to do many things not possible before, it's also brought with it a certain sense of entitlement with it, and it's made the IT world a real  pain in the ass!

[Tom Speirs]

Well, it was always a lot more advanced your side of the pond but we have caught up a lot since then, although still have to deal with 50hz broadcast TV but reclocking to 60hz and upscaling to 4k can be done now in Realtime which is to do with why I bought the card. I just got my phd in converting vhs in 2021. The only video footage of mu mum and dad I have came out frigging amazing

[hansolo77]

I wish Mom was able to rescue the stuff out of her storage unit rather than let it go unpaid and sold.  She had our only VHS home movies, and I had intended to digitize it for a gift just to find out that it's gone.   

[Draco1962]

On 6/4/2021 at 6:20 PM, Tom Speirs said:

Well, it was always a lot more advanced your side of the pond but we have caught up a lot since then, although still have to deal with 50hz broadcast TV but reclocking to 60hz and upscaling to 4k can be done now in Realtime which is to do with why I bought the card. I just got my phd in converting vhs in 2021. The only video footage of mu mum and dad I have came out frigging amazing

I'll have to pick your brain on setting up some kit and software for conversion of some of the family VHS we have to burn to Blu-ray.

[Tom Speirs]

If your interested but this was by no means a cheap project but here was my worklfow. Probably the best way in 2021. i did a lot of research on this and probably spent $800 on kit.

- AVerMedia SD PCIe video capture card CE310B (new)

- Corsair Elgato Game Capture 4K60 Pro MK.2 (new)

- Refurbished Super vhs player from ebay (need one with TBC).

- RTX 2080 super (already had).

- Capture to avermedia card from svideo with cropping to x264 lossless and pcm audio with ffmpeg

- deinterlace with avisynth qtgmc preset very slow to x264 lossless and pcm audio with ffmpeg

- encode again lossless but with aspect set to 4:3 (only set meta data, don't resize). 

- Playback with potplayer (x86) with madvr plugin at 4k with noise removal and smooth motion to 60hz. (don't need smooth motion for NTSC)

- Capture potplayer with Corsair Elgato Game Capture 4K60 Pro MK.2

[tthurman]

I went about this on a budget after seeing the cost of Super VHS with built in TBC.

Videonics makes some video mixers that have TBC, now mind you it's not high end professional quality, but still effective. 

I'm outputting:  VHS ----- Videonics ----- retrotink 2X ------ Capture device (via super video)

 

It also scrubs much of the encoding that was popular back in the VHS days.

 

The Retrotink 2x  then doubles the lines and the smoothing feature seems to help, even though this isn't really what Mike designed it for. 

 

 

[tthurman]

Seems the the  Videonics mixers have caught on for this, or at least the ebay prices seem to indicate so.  I had to watch for a while to get a decent deal myself, so be patient if your interested and forget any MXPro that doesn't have the power supply, it's a paperweight without it.

The MX-1 is all you need, but I went for the MX-Pro.

https://www.videomaker.com/article/7529-digital-video-mixer-review-videonics-mxpro

[tthurman]

On 6/4/2021 at 6:20 PM, Tom Speirs said:

Well, it was always a lot more advanced your side of the pond

It was good while it lasted, but Cyberian's business model wasn't' sustainable during that time period as online shopping was still in its infancy, and it all quickly came to an end when Fry's bought them.

[Tom Speirs]

(Apparently DVR recorders also have basic TBC)

[Tom Speirs]

Here is a little sample of my final video result. (856mb 4k 60fps). It will buffer. It's big.

 

 

[tthurman]

Wow, that looks fantastic!