Tue Feb 13, 2018 11:16 am
Just few notes: VHS is 240 lines, HD is 1080 lines. Demanding VHS captured in HD is just ignorance. Upconverting VHS to HD, before proper frame reconstruction, noise handling and image enhancements are done, is just ruining the chances to do that properly.
The best possible way to capture VHS is in it's nature PAL/SECAM or NTSC format that plaback device is outing it.
While VHS is poor by any means by today's standards, it is still analog, so no quality can be overkill for capturing it. It is wrong opinion that "resolution" is important. The sampling and compresion is. While there is laughably poor color information in VHS standard, it is so important that this fraction of colors we get is not further diminished by sieve of digital color sampling. DV codec or any consumer (delivery) codecs like MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 are not suitable for the task, since they throw away even more color information. Only 4:4:4 is the right answer. Compression is less of an issue, but still ProRes or DNx are not the best codecs either*
If VHS is captured at native resolution, files are much smaller than HD, so they can go uncompressed 444 while captured and than stored into low compression constant quality codec that highly preserves noise or grain as is, like CINEFORM 444. It can be 8-bit though, but 444 and FilmScan1 (2 if heavy signal restoration is expected).
* I use DNxHD on Atomos Ninja 2 to capture HDMI signal from consumer HDV camcorder Canon HV40. Signal from this camcorder have ton of (color) noise unless in stellar light situation and exposed perfectly. A image captured in 4:2:2 DNxHD is harder to clean, using NeatVideo, than same scene captured from HDV tape. So I always use highest datarate of DNxHD allowed, because this codec, along ProRes, makes blocking artefacts out of noise, and compression makes that even worse. In comparison MPEG2 at 25Mbit preserves original noise better and it is more salvagable with NeatVideo than from thoose pro codecs at 7 times higher bitrate, because they expect perfect input signal to be encoded.
Summary: Play VHS from the best (most stable) deck, route it through proper TBC, and capture with device that offer wastly higher sampling frequency than analog signal is, into uncompressed, interlaced and full color sampling SD format. Than use some lossless codec like CINFORM/444 to store files until they are handled properly with post production, and for long term storage. CINEFORM against DNxHD is open standard and readily available.
Hope it helps to someone.
Editing since 1993: JVC, SONY, AVID, FAST, PINACLE, PREMIERE, LIQUID, FINALCUT, INCITE, PREMIERE PRO, RESOLVE