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Post #1465820

Author
WXM
Parent topic
Help: Looking For... Stanley Kubrick VHS Rips
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1465820/action/topic#1465820
Date created
7-Jan-2022, 12:24 AM

While there are shortcut ways that can give you something kind of passable, capturing feature films on VHS at high quality is often pretty work intensive. My personal method of VHS capping is to do a minimum of four captures and “average” or median them as simultaneous (natural) noise reduction and detail enhancement. My equipment is down right now, but this list of steps is to give an idea of what generally might be considered a VHS capping method people would use for the high standards we expect these days (as in something that might by up-res’d with Topaz and other AI software)…

  1. Carefully set up then losslessly cap the full movie from the VHS tape four or more times (must all be done at 1x playback speed). The output file of one capture can easily be over 80GBs; for long movies over 100GBs. So for this whole thing you should have 1TB+ free to be safe…for getting just ONE movie onto your computer. 😮
  2. Scan each of those capture files for dupe frames, which though automated, still means the software going through hundreds of thousands of frames. Also, anything else that keeps the cap files from being perfect frame-by-frame matches with each other needs to be corrected. (E.g., a glitch spot of six repeating frames will need a patch inserted from one of the other captures, and this kind of thing is not uncommon and is a time-consuming repair.)
  3. Save out a new version of each capture file with those fixes made (dupe frames removed, patching, etc.)
  4. Collapse those files all “on top of each other” (the averaging) into a new output file, which may process-chug along at like only 6fps (unless you have a great rig), resulting in yet another HUGE file, and one that could take many hours to “render.”
  5. Enjoy your sense of relief at finally having this capture done!

(Note that I’ve still left PITA stuff out of that list.) So, imagine doing this for a VHS of Barry Lyndon with its running time of over three hours. Just step 1 you’re talking (well) over twelve hours and a lot of babysitting. Everything together you’re talking possibly days of work off and on (but still needing focused attention), and a huge amount of hard drive space, just for the end result of one solid (final) file made from a from a VHS tape.

Compare with ripping a DVD or BD where you more or less just have the computer and software do 99.99% of the work getting the image and sound to your hard drive, 1:1 bit perfect (unlike VHS where there are no bits), and this might happen with just one read/passthrough of the movie data at half the playback speed of the movie. So, getting Barry Lyndon to you computer from a DVD takes 85mins. of you just going out and running errands while the computer does all the work, while getting it from a VHS tape takes three days of you babysitting if not doing a lot of work keeping things solid and straight, double checking, patching, wrangling the different capture files (to keep them from being too different from each other since you need to merge them all together), etc.

Summing up, if you don’t get people responding here, don’t take it hard or personally. Capping in higher qualities requires a pretty good and specific set-up, a lot of time and devotion, a lot of hard drive space…