Blackmagic Forum

We have ordered an intesity extreme thunderbot for MAC OSX to capture a large amount of material from VHS and laserdisc via composite video.

What comb filter does the BMI have? 2D/3D, 3, 4, 5 line?

Does anyone have any technical info, and would we be better off using a Teranex instead?

Are you just trying to capture at SD, or are you trying to upconvert in the process? If so, then the Teranex will give you the best quality but it is also much more expensive. For simply importing VHS to an SD codec, you're probably fine with the Intensity.

Well, the final result would be upscaled, but we are still debating whether it is better to do the upscaling after capturing at SD and cleaning up the footage and colour correcting it etc. before upscaling.

The question for us is, which has the better SD capture via composite, the Intensity Extreme, or the Teranex?

I'm having trouble finding *any* information on the composite capture specifications of either system.

The teranex is going to give you noise reduction, which you'll probably need for the VHS. In our experience noise isn't really much of an issue with laserdisc, laser rot is (look for bubbles on the data side of the disc, and if you see them, you're going to have serious dropout problems).

Also, the older Teranex VC300 we have (with the ImageEnhance package) has some filters to deal with dot crawl. not sure if that's in the new ones, but that could be handy with both VHS and LD since they're both composite formats and will likely suffer from that problem.

-perry

Apparently the image enhancement isn't going to be available on the new units.
We are using an X9 player with the tighter laser, it seems to handle all but the worst cases of LD rot, it looks like we may have to find something that has a better comb filter to reduce the dot-crawl as much as possible.
I wish someone made an external comb filter based on the Ti TVP-5160 chip, that thing was an insanely good comb filter, best I've seen.