Wed Nov 29, 2017 7:00 pm
I recently started to digitise and upscale some of my old S-VHS, VHS and miniDV tapes for a film I'm working on. I wanted the highest possible quality and also upscale to HD or UHD at the same time. I bought a Teranex Express and it is simply mindblowingly, outrageously brilliant. Not only does it do a perfect de-interlace, its realtime upscale - even to UHD - is insanely good. I know it's pricey, so rent it if it's too much for a one-off job. Of course it also does amazing frame-rate conversions. I sound like a Teranex fanboy, but there's a reason why it's the industry standard. No endless rendering times - realtime processing - what's not to love about that. It outputs to SDI which I simply connect to my Decklink 4K Studio to capture. I have hundreds of hours of tape to capture, so I bought a small UltraStudio Mini Recorder to capture the HD upscales of the Teranex to my MacBook instead of using my desktop computer. Another strategy which works well and I've also used, is to use a BlackMagic 4K Video Assist and record your Teranex output onto SD cards. To play the VHS tapes I found an old Sony SVO-5800P which was a 'broadcast quality' S/VHS player in its day. The cool thing is, it has Component (YUV) output for best (analog) quality which I feed into a BlackMagic Analog to SDI converter which feeds the Teranex. Whatever I do with my new digitised masters now, whether editing and colouring in Resolve or sending to Fusion, I'm just amazed at the quality the above-mentioned pipeline has delivered. Obviously you have to be realistic, an analogue SD, interlaced video image will never compete with natively shot digital HD or UHD footage, but it definitely has a look and is definitely usable. Believe me, I've tried just about every software conversion software on the market to scale up and de-interlace my S-VHS footage, but the final results and horrendous render times (for the tons of footage I have) was no match for the Teranex monster.