[sound of VHS cassette being inserted into VCR and heads spinning up]
As the world steadily moved from the realm of analog signals to digital information,
we kept facing the challenge of how to convert our beloved and wholesome analog recordings
into sterile, never-changing strings of ones and zeroes.
Remember kids, vinyl is better because it’s imperfect!
Anyway, converting analog *audio* to digital audio was no big deal.
I mean, technically it all starts as analog signals from microphones anyway, so once we
figured out how to record sound waves as a series of instantaneous intensity samples
taken at a frequency of at least twice the highest sound frequency we’d like to capture
and bandlimiting the input and output which guarantees the sound will be reproduced exactly
as it was captured because the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem proves that to be the case…
once we figured out how to Digital Sound it was simply a matter of recording an analog
source and then all your favorite artists are now immortalized on Compact Disc!
It is almost hilariously easy to get a decent digital sound recording from an analog source.
Need to digitize a cassette?
Just plug a walkman into your laptop, download everyone’s favorite open-source audio software,
hit play, hit record, and look at that!
Sound waves make samples, samples make soundwaves.
Of course if you’re not using a $10,000 ADC and the latest in gold plated Oleum Anguis
cables, you’re really not getting the true experience.
Pfft.
People who listen to music for what it IS.
But, converting analog video into digital video has remained a frustrating process full
of forum posts about which deinterlacing algorithm is the best, which video capture cards work
best and which don’t, dealing with audio synchronization issues, and even once you’ve
settled on something that works reliably, it almost never looks like analog video actually looked.
No one is pretending that captures from a VHS tape should look as good as this gorgeous
video you’re watching right now.
But, I’d say a good 90% of the VHS captures I’ve seen floating around the Interwebs
look washed out, kinda blocky, and in general just a lot worse than VHS actually was.
[ upbeat music ] It doesn’t have to be this way!
With this one weird trick, you’ll find out how to take your VHS captures from this
-- to this.
Now as is the usual case with this channel, we’re gonna go into far more detail
than a casual viewer may need so if you really just want to know what I use to get captures
like this go ahead and skip to here, but be warned that in some ways this is very easy,
and in other ways it’s frustrating and in either case will likely require video editing
software of some kind to produce an output file worthy of publishing anywhere.
But I mean.
Those results.
Mmmmm…
Alright, so let’s start with what makes the process of analog video capture so gnarly.
An analog video signal is far more complicated than simple audio signals.
Since it’s designed to synchronize the raster pattern of a television set and define the
intensities of the red, green, and blue electron guns in a CRT, all the while doing so with
weird complicated math designed to produce a color output from a single monochrome signal,
it’s not as easy as taking some samples of the signal’s intensity and reconstructing
them later.
Especially because digital video is nothing like digital audio.
Any video capture device has to take that analog signal, actually build an image with
it by approximating how a CRT would natively draw it, break that image up into an array
of logical pixels, take RGB values of each one, and then encode that as digital video
however you like.
And because that’s not difficult enough, it also has to decide whether to keep it as
interlaced video and let whatever device will play it back decide how to deal with that,
or whether it should deinterlace the video now and then be stuck with however good its native
deinterlacing algorithm is.
Oh right.
Interlacing.
That thing we did in the analog video space because it was the 1940’s and bandwidth
wasn’t just growing on trees.
We needed the CRT to refresh fast enough to make flicker imperceptible, so we drew the
image in alternating lines called fields twice as frequently as we could if we filled it
all in at once.
Said the engineers of the day, that won’t ever cause a problem down the road, will it?
Well here we are in the 21st century and it’s a problem.
Captain Disillusion just made a really greater primer on interlacing if you want to know
a little more about it, but now that we use televisions, computers, and smartphones with
LCD, OLED, and
*future*
displays that stay constantly lit and thus don’t have to deal
with flicker, deciding how to deal with an image source that effectively is doing
this
can be a tricky thing.
And yet, even now in 2019, new television sets include a composite input, and they manage
to spread those 480 interlaced lines into 1,080 or even 2,160 rows of progressive pixels
with grace and dignity.
And once you process that a little bit, you’ll start to wonder why video captures tend to
be so bad.
See, this television doesn’t have an electron gun blindly following orders from the little
yellow cable.
It’s got a giant grid of pixels, so just like any capture device, it has to take this
incoming signal, approximate how a CRT would draw it, and then … draw it.
And of course it also has to de-interlace that signal because the panel runs at 60p
not 60i, so it does everything an analog-to-digital converting capture device does.
But it doesn’t make blocky video.
It’s not weirdly interlaced.
And the colors are vibrant.
It looks fine.
Dare I say it, it looks GOOD.
I bought this TV just a couple of weeks ago, and I put some pictures of it up on Twitter
praising how good its composite input is.
And the responses to it (particularly this one) got me thinking.
See, almost by accident, I’ve been using a pair of devices to capture analog video
for various clips here on YouTube, and one of them probably uses the same methods this
TV does to get that analog signal turned into digital video.
And if my memory is right, this all got started from a video Techmoan made about (or perhaps
simply featuring) a new A/V receiver which upscaled composite video and spat it out to
the TV over HDMI.
I’ve looked for that video and can’t figure out which one it was but suffice to say I
was intrigued by the prospect of a device which could “upscale” composite video,
but I wasn’t in the market for an A/V receiver.
So I went to my friendly neighborhood Amazon and spent a whole $30 on this thing.
Tried it out.
Wasn’t overly blown away by it.
It seemed perhaps marginally better than what my TV could do on its own, but nothing so
extraordinary that I couldn’t live without.
But then it hit me.
If this thing is outputting to HDMI, that means it’s done analog-to-digital conversion,
and clearly it doesn’t suck because it’s actually a little bit better than what my
TV could do on its own.
So, I went back to my friendly neighborhood Amazon and looked for something which could
capture HDMI and spit it onto something.
These exist because gamers, and in my case I wouldn’t have to worry about any sort
of HDCP compliance because the signal it’s getting isn’t copy protected, so I went
with cheap.
Even then it was around the $70 mark.
These things in general just aren’t very cheap, but all-in now we’re at $100.
I tried it out, and whoa.
This is it.
This is how to capture analog video when quality matters over all else.
For those of you just joining us, here’s how to capture analog video with the same
quality that your TV displays it.
Find yourself a composite to HDMI converter.
You may want to use the search term “upscaler”.
This $30 one works reasonably well enough, though there might be --nay, certainly are
better options.
Next, get some sort of HDMI capture device.
I’ve been using this cheap stand-alone thing that records to a flash drive and while it
presents some limitations, it’s perfectly fine for my needs.
If you want, you could get one that allows your computer to directly record the source.
Whatever floats your boat.
Just make sure it can record whatever your chosen digital-spitter-outer thing spits out.
And that’s… it.
Now for my use case, this is extremely hassle free.
I have my composite-to-HDMI converter attached to the output of my A/V receiver, and the
actual capture device sits atop this VCR.
Now, anything that goes through the A/V receiver can be captured just by plugging in a flash
drive and hitting that button.
And when I’m done, I hit the button again, wait for the flash drive to stop writing,
and boom.
There’s my file.
You might also be happy to know that Macrovision doesn’t bother this thing.
I of course don’t know why that might make you happy, but if it does, well now you know.
And now is where things may or may not get a little weird.
My capture thingy only records 60 frames per second in 720p, so I have the output of my
digital-spitter-outer thing set to 720p.
Which honestly, we’re dealing with 480i footage so that’s still capturing the whole
thing and then some.
But, the output file is stretched to 16:9 because one of these two devices isn’t smart enough.
And that means you probably want to un-stretch it.
If you don’t want to we can’t be friends.
Also of note is that, at least in my situation, the audio level in the resulting recordings
is really, really low.
I can boost it well enough in Premiere but noise does start to poke through.
I haven’t tried running the audio separately into the line-input of the capture device
which I think would almost certainly fix that, but I’m just warning you could run into this.
The biggest inconvenience is that the files do eventually get split.
Depending on what you want to do this may or may not be an issue, and for how I use
this it’s no big deal at all.
I’m typically just grabbing one or two minute clips to put in a video, and then I’m only
using 10 or so seconds at a time.
But if you’re looking to backup home videos or other longer content, you’ll have to
stitch these files together.
If you don’t have any experience with video editing software this might seem daunting,
but you’ll pick it up quick.
Plus, other solutions such as USB devices for your PC which capture HDMI may not do
this, but I don’t have experience to comment with authority on that matter.
For me, if for instance there’s a home video I want to back up, I’ll start a new Premiere
project, and throw each file on the timeline.
Now I want to un-stretch this.
I personally am OK with them being rendered as a widescreen video with black bars on the
side, so I’m not going to bother resizing the output file into a 4:3 aspect ratio and
suitable resolution.
Instead I’ll keep it at 720P widescreen, but with the actual video source scaled correctly.
In Premiere, you can save a preset so you don’t have to keep doing this manually,
and apply it to multiple clips at once.
Another small wrinkle I deal with is the fact that the image isn’t perfectly centered
and there’s a black bar along one edge, but if you’re placing it on a floating background
of black that isn’t visible anyway.
As it currently stands I put a big audio gain on all of the clips so that they’re not
super quiet, and now I’m done.
I’ll re-render this into whatever video format I like.
If I’m just putting this as a clip into an existing project
(like I’m doing for this very video)
I simply take the original file and scale it accordingly.
And that’s it.
For me personally, this is the best situation imaginable.
The capture device stays as part of my video equipment setup, always ready to capture from
a Laserdisc, VHS tape, PS2, or whatever else I may throw at it.
All I need is a flash drive.
And the output files are not only better than any conventional capture method I’ve used
so far, they’re more convenient.
There are two small caveats, though.
The first is that its deinterlacing is very close to perfect, but not quite.
Every once in a while there will be a frame showing two fields at once.
I’ll take that over bad deinterlacing any day, especially because it’s only noticeable
under certain circumstances.
PLUS, and this is especially important, since it produces a non-interlaced file, it’s
easier to incorporate these into a progressive video like everything we do today, so you’ll
be sure that the output file isn’t deinterlaced poorly upon being converted to 30 frames per
second, or 60 frames per second should you decide to preserve the analog smoothness we
all know and love.
And the other thing is that, on some occasions, it’s produced output files that Premiere
does NOT like.
It hasn’t happened in a while, so it may be that Premiere updates have fixed it, or
perhaps it improved with time somehow, but whatever the case, I was able to run the file
through Media Encoder and get something out that Premiere would import without crashing.
Weirdly, Windows never had a problem playing the files as they were.
But, worst case scenario, just capture it again.
So, if you do a lot of video capturing and are looking for quality above all else, you
might want to consider trying this.
I’ve been quite pleased with it, and while it may seem a bit absurd compared to more
conventional options, I really think this is on the whole among the best options right now.
My previous method for capturing analog video, which you saw in the earlier comparison clip,
involved recording onto a DVD-RAM disc at the highest bitrate possible and then importing
that into a video editor to be re-exported as natively interlaced video.
I had previously considered this to be the best option for quality, (and it was used
in some of my earlier videos) but I’m eating my words now.
And given the convenience advantage of my admittedly kinda weird capture setup, I’ll
deal with piecing clips together if I have to.
Now, is this night-and-day better?
Not quite.
I find it to be much less blocky, particularly with scenes involving motion, but that’s
mainly down to the fact that it’s encoding these clips with more modern h.264 compression.
You can still notice some blocks in areas like the sky here or other almost-solid-color
areas, but for my money, this looks far truer to real analog video than does my old method
of capturing, and many others I’ve seen.
Since this method might very well be improved with a better upscaler and/or a better recorder,
I’m pretty confident in saying this is worth a try.
Thanks for watching, and I hope this video will be helpful to some of you.
There are a lot of dedicated people who are archiving all sorts of analog video recordings,
which is increasingly important as those old recordings wear out or degrade and may be lost to time.
While this solution may not be the best for doing large amounts of archival work, I’d
say for personal use (particularly for saving home videos, etc) its added hassles make it
worth it.
I’ll be back with a full-on video soon.
For now, enjoy a selection of VHS and Laserdisc captures done with this device.
♫ progressively smooth jazz ♫