The thread for budding television archivists to discuss their craft
My Youtube channel is called igth4t.
It’s separate to my main Youtube account mubd1234 because I don’t want copyright strikes to take the main channel down. I try to upload adverts as well as obscure programs that I assume the copyright holders don’t really care about.
Here are a few vids I’ve uploaded (out of many)…
My setup consists of an AverMedia U3 ExtremeCap USB capture card, connected via HDMI to an LG VCR/DVD Combo unit (it was purchased some time between 2012 and 2014 from what I recall, I’m borrowing it off a neighbour).
Before that, I was digitising video tapes using the same capture card, but with a Sony VCR and a separate DVD recorder in the middle to act as an HDMI converter. Unfortunately the DVD recorder shat itself (it was already pretty flaky, I had replaced one of the capacitors on the main board already).
The main issue with using a cheap AV to HDMI device (available on eBay for peanuts) hooked directly to a VCR is that many of them don’t have decent timebase correction for the analogue video, so you get terrible results with wavy video. DVD recorders and, even better, HDMI VCRs, have better TBC units.
I implore anyone wishing to get into archiving video to watch this:
I wasted a lot of time with EasyCap capture cards and their terrible video quality before I took on the advice espoused in the above video and using an upconverter. And for goodness’ sake - please capture video in 50FPS if possible to preserve the original video fluidity.
See the comparison between this original music video here (uploaded to Youtube in 25fps), and the 50FPS upload I made: