Hi,

I have been given the task of processing a large quantity of home video that was recorded both on Hi8/8 tapes and Digital Hi8.

I am using Pinnacle Studio Ultimate version 12, I have new powerful PC (XP SP3) with firewire input, and a Sony Handycam DCR-TRV330 at my disposal.

Ripping the digital tapes is perfectly fine and works great. The problem is the analog tapes. The Handycam plays them fine and outputs to composite fine, but when I try to output through firewire I have some weird glitches. First of all, I eventually get disconnect on the audio (though I sort of expected that over a two hour tape). The bad problem, though, is that two black bars appear on the two vertical edges of the tape digital recording. I don't see these in normal playback on the TV or in the LCD.

Here are some screenshots for comparison:

Digital Shot: http://www.shatteredrhythm.com/rand...rameDigital.jpg

NonDigital Shot: http://www.shatteredrhythm.com/rand...dNonDigital.jpg

Any idea what's going on? Could this be solved by running it through another digitizing device or what?

Most camcorder LCD's; viewfinders and TV's do not show the entire frame whereas many editors do. The DVD authoring software I use shows a "safe" area for titles; that area which will not be cropped when viewing. On TV's it is commonly referred to as overscan. The left and right edges is normally a portion of the horizontal blanking intervals or if on the bottom most likely head switching noise; both are common.

Over the years I have heard various advice of what to do. Ignore it, add black edges to even them up or cover noise or crop the image. This year I have been cropping the image, there is not a noticeable loss of video quality as some people (who aparantly have not done it) claim. I leave it on my original analog to digital converted video and fix it while editing.

I hate the term "ripping"..... I think I will go rip and apple pie and coffee....




Rich

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FireWire Survey

Thanks! A couple follow up questions...

Ok, so this always happens with analog? So does the digital recording process simply capture more or is the digital video simply stretching the video source?

And I suppose ripping is a hang on from disc based media....

Thanks! A couple follow up questions...

Ok, so this always happens with analog? So does the digital recording process simply capture more or is the digital video simply stretching the video source?

And I suppose ripping is a hang on from disc based media....

This has happened in one form or another when I have processed analog video and I have been doing it on and off for years with various pieces of equipment. If you want the best conversion then a good way is with a Canopus unit. There are a variety of options for converting analog video such as VHS, VHS-C, 8mm tape or Hi8 to digital. You might carefully read through these threads which deals with analog to digital conversions:

Hi8 Video Transfer
Best D8 camcorder for 8/Hi8 playback quality
Capturing Video8 and Hi8 - guides
Best D8 camcorder for 8/Hi8 playback quality
Audio/Video Adapter
VHS-C to Computer Help

It isn't really stretching or squeezing the video, the circuits do not detect the end of the horizontal line until it has gone into what is called "blacker than black" (yep, a real term) and it has captured the horizontal syncing information to come back and draw the next line. It is normal, it has been there for over 50 years, it's just that you were never allowed to normally see it.

Well, you aren't ripping the video. You are going a complex analog to digital conversion of signals. Here is a simple explanation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog...gital_converter


Rich

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FireWire Survey

Ok, thanks for your help.

Back to it for me!

I've digitised quite a lot of analog Hi8 tapes using the firewire output of a digital8 camcorder and I've never had a problem with the audio.

As poncho says, the black bars are quite normal. Digital video is 720 samples (or pixels) wide, while the analog picture occupies a slightly narrower range (for example PAL is 702 samples) leaving the remaining pixels black. This isn't missing or cropped picture detail, it is in the analog specs. There's more detail here:

http://www.dvmp.co.uk/digital-video.htm

When digitised, I've found that there is a color abberation down the right hand side. I note that your screenshot has a little of this on both sides. I managed to fix this by using an Avisynth script which cloned adjacent color information (but without changing the luminance component which was correct and which carries the major amount of detail). In my case I encoded my footage to MPEG/DVD, so I did this filtering while the decompressed frames were being fed to the MPEG encoder in YV12 format - this avoided recompressing the footage or changing the color space just to do the Avisynth filtering. If you're interested I can hunt out the script.