How to convert VHS videotape to 60p digital video (NTSC)

most people who grew up with videotape remember how smooth it looked if you recorded a news cast or a sporting event or soap opera directly to videotape it has this sort of smooth fluid motion if that's the case why do most videotape conversions look worse than the original and not as smooth in this tutorial I'm going to answer that question and also teach you how to convert video tape to digital video correctly we'll also cover what you need to do if you want your conversion to look smooth even after being uploaded to YouTube now I just want to state this is me working without a script very informal tutorial and this is aimed at a beginner audience there are a lot of advanced topics I could go into such as noise reduction but I'm going to keep it simple I want everyone to learn this and we can go into advanced topics later also we're going to use very low cost Hardware in order to do this 20 dollars should be all you would ever need to perform these conversions and we're also going to use completely free software tools in this tutorial I'm using Windows 7 64 bit but the same concepts apply no matter what operating system and tools you're using so I hope even if you're not running Windows or can't use these tools that you'll keep watching so first off let's identify the problem the specifications for North American analog video that is NTSC video states that video is stored broadcast and stored at 30 frames per second what most people don't understand is that each frame actually hides two different images one sixtieth of a second apart in time the two different images are stored mashed together in the single frame this is known as interlaced video because the images are interlaced on alternate lines let's take a frame of interlaced video and zoom in and you can see exactly what's going on now do you see those ragged edges where there's motion if it looks like two different images are sort of mashed together that's because they are interlaced video stores one image on the even lines that is to say line 0 2 4 6 etc and another one on the odd lines 1 3 5 7 etc each of these sets of lines is called a field so while analog video is 30 frames per second it is also technically correct 60 fields per second because each field is an image it's really 60 images per second that is what gives it its smoothness and its detail so in order for us to convert video tape to digital video correctly all we need to do is make sure that we capture both fields that is all the lines and that we also convert it properly extracting both sets of lines and converting them into full frames so that we end up with a 60 frame per second digital video so in order to get started we're going to need a piece of hardware that can take analog video and convert it into digital video ever since about 2005 there have been very many of these devices some a little more expensive than others you can get practically all of them for $20 or less you can find them used on eBay or sometimes even new on Amazon or wherever here's three of these devices the first one is very cheap and is marketed under very many names it's commonly known as an easy cap device and this is actually the device that I'm going to be using in this tutorial it goes by many different names not all of them English but I thought I'd show it to you so you could recognize it another common device and one that I actually prefer to use is the dazzle DBC 100 this is something that used to be sold by dazzle and then pinnacle and again you can find this on eBay used for usually 20 dollars now it's important to get the DVC 100 that is because there's a version that looks like this but is actually the DBC 90 and the 90 does not have 64-bit windows drivers so do get the 100 finally there's another device that is preferred by a lot of console gamers who like to livestream it's called the IO data GV - USB - you can buy this new for $40 don't be scared by the Japanese writing on the package when you install the driver the driver is in English so you can still use it once you've picked Hardware we need some software and we're going to be using essentially just two pieces of free software the first one is virtualdub which is sort of a Swiss Army knife for video it can capture video and it can also edit it and run filters on it and that is what we'll be using for this tutorial later on when we have our converted video file it's going to be very large and needs to be compressed into a modern video format like mp4 for that we're going to use handbrake handbrake is actually available on Linux and Mac as well but we're going to be using it on Windows and again it's only a few easy steps to take your large edited video and compress it down into mpeg-4 okay let's start capturing and converting video I'm going to fire up virtualdub and when it starts it's empty we need to capture a file first so let's go to file capture avi now once you're in the capture mode I don't have my video source playing right now so that's why this is blank but let's go through everything that you need to do first you need to make sure you're picking the right device in this case my easy cap shows up as USB 2.0 grabber not a very you know distinctive name but that's it so always make sure you pick it and the window goes away and then comes back as the device reinitialize --is then make sure you've picked the right video source in our case I'm going to be recording from actually an analog handy cam obviously you would mostly be converting from a VHS and VHS player and in both cases this is going to be composite next up we want to check caPSURE pin this is where you determine the format and the frame rate of what you're capturing now ntsc analog video is actually 29.97 frames per second so you should put that in I know you would think that 30 which is what was there originally would be a more even round number but this is the actual broadcast rate of NTSC video 29.97 frames per second you will get less dropped frames and less problems if you put in the actual frame rate the color space should stay yuy - this is most likely what you're going to see if you don't see if you see something different leave it alone it's probably the correct default and then for the actual capture size what we want is something that retains all 480 lines you'll see the default here is 720 by 480 we also have a 640 by 480 choice this is up to you but the typical digital representation of NTSC analog video is this slightly strange aspect ratio 720 by 480 so unless you absolutely think you know what you're doing you should really leave it at that now when I picked that I notice that it reset my framerate so I'm going to put that whoops put that back to 29.97 and hit OK now once it reinitialize --is we can see down here that it is set to 29.97 and it seems to be detecting about between 30 and 31 but this is correct let's see I've noticed the audio rate is off but we'll get to that in a second in capture filter under the video menu you get options for your driver specifically some of these depending on what device you have captured you might have stuff like this like VCR input which would relax capture timing based on whether or not you had a VCR with a really stretched out tape or not and then almost all of these have video proc amp which lets you adjust the brightness and the contrast and everything I'm actually going to force this to defaults right now you may have to adjust this depending on how bad your tape is but it's not a bad idea to start with the defaults so we'll do that wait for the window to reinitialize again there it is and that's actually it in terms of how many lines in the correct frame rate the last thing we need to do is pick how we're going to store the video so for that we go down to the compression option and you may be tempted to do no compression and that's fine but keep in mind that 720 by 480 at 30 frames per second is going to take up quite a lot of video roughly between 26 and 30 gig per hour so that is generally you want to pick a compression codec now when you pick one of these you should pick one that will that will affect the video the least because it's going to get compressed later to mpeg-4 so this should be what is known as a lossless codec you can see in my list I actually have lagarith lossless codec I also have a few others that are my favorites such as UT video which I find very fast and I'm actually going to use UT videos so I'm going to pick that now if you don't have lagertha or you don't have UT video don't worry I'm going to put a link in the description of this video so that you can download them and they're free just like virtual dubs so you won't have to pay anything for them alright so we've got our size our frame rate now we move on to audio and what I want to do is change the raw capture format I don't know how this got to 9600 stereo but that's overkill for our source what we're going to do is you should pick either 44100 stereo or 48 stereo I'm going to pick 48 okay and as soon as the window reinitialize is we can double check in the lower right hand corner that we are ready to go 48 kilohertz 16-bit stereo and we're set to record at 2997 now the last thing we need to do before actually recording is go to the capture tab and look at timing now this is going to be different in any capture program that you have in virtualdub the capture timing dialog describes how you want virtualdub to handle tape dropouts so video tape isn't perfect and if you're trying to convert it you're probably working with 20 or 30 year old sources and over time video tape stretches and that affects the timing sometimes frames can be dropped or lost sometimes they can arrive too closely and that's what this dialogue does the main options I like to enable in virtualdub when capturing are both of these two drop frames when they're come when they're too close together and insert blank frames not sorry not blank insert null frames when they're too far apart a null frame is just simply a duplicate of the previous frame leave these both checked and then resync mode I like to have it at the very last option which is sync audio to video by resampling the audio so what this means is if frames get dropped or inserted virtualdub will keep the video timing at 2997 and it will maintain audio sync by reece sampling the audio audio sync is very important if you are capturing an hour-long video the last thing you want after your capture after an hour has gone by is to go back and play it and find that as the video plays the audio keeps getting farther and farther behind or farther and farther ahead until at the end of your hour-long tape people talk you see their lips move and then three seconds later you hear the sound and that's that's horror so leave this checked and you won't have sync problems and then the rest you can leave it at defaults and hit OK after that we are ready to capture but first we have to set where we're going to capture this information to so do file set capture file I'm going to pick a very large directory on a raid drive that I have let's call this raw capture and hit save and now we are actually ready to start I'm going to start playing my analog source I've hit play on my player right now and it should show up there we go and to record it all we need to do is do capture capture video and after a second or two it will start there we go whoops there's an error in the tape this is why it's important to have all the recent options on ok so there's some nice motion Doggy goes around the baby you can see down at the bottom it is in fact recording the audio I left audio playback off because it would interfere with this screencast but you can turn on audio monitoring if you like alright that seems to be good enough we'll go ahead and stop the video rather we're going to stop capturing the video is still playing on my player which I will stop right now so we just captured to the file we set up H temp raw capture now remember when I had corruption in that videotape with when it got all noisy over on the right we get some summary of statistics that were taken from the capture and we can see down here that sure enough there was a problem with the timing and it inserted 17 frames for us which was very nice of it ok now that we have the video let's move on to editing to start editing let's do file exit the capture mode will go back to the main editing window of virtualdub and then we can load the file that we created raw capture virtualdub shows you two windows the first window is the file without any processing and then the second window is the file after processing since we haven't done anything yet they are the same you can scrub through the video to double check it there's that corruption right at the end right at the beginning rather and I am actually going to cut that out virtualdub is extremely easy to use as a very simple editor if you want to cut out a section you hit the HOME key on the keyboard move to where that's the beginning of what you want to edit move to the end hit the end key and then just hit delete and it will allow you have now cut out that section now that's all well and good but take a look at our source video remember how I said video was interlaced well let's zoom in sure enough you can see this sort of combing effect some people call it Mouse teeth and as we go through by stepping the arrow keys left and right we can see that sure enough there are two moments in time in this file there's the dog when it's in this position and then the dog when it's moving a little bit more in this position let's put this back to a hundred percent so we need to process the fields we need to separate them out into their own full frames and virtualdub has a handy filter for that and we can apply it by going to video filters ad D interlace and when you do that it gives you several options what de interlacing does is what it's supposed to do anyway is separate the fields into their own frames now up until five or ten years ago roughly people didn't really understand how to handle deinterlacing and so there were some fairly horrible options like blend them both together or throw one of them away or duplicate one all of these are bad because they will give you a 30 frames per second output where you have thrown away one of the images one of the fields inside this frame we don't want that what we want instead is to try to interpolate each field into its own Frane we have three options here yad if is the best so we're going to use that and then again rather than keeping only the top of the bottom we want to double the framerate now you have two options here top field first and bottom and the thing is this is different for each capture device so what you have to do is pick one single step through the video and see if you're right and then if you're not pick the other one this isn't there's nothing wrong with this it all depends on how the capture device is and how the driver is you just have to find the right one for your specific device so I'm going to pick bottom and then hit OK and now over in the after filter window on the right side I'm going to single step with the arrow keys I'm only going to be pressing the right arrow key to go forward in time so here we go 1 2 3 4 now already you can tell something's wrong the dog looks like it's taking one step forward two steps back right so it goes back forward back forward back forward we have the field order wrong instead of getting the fields in the order that we want which would be field zero then one and two then three then four we're getting them like we're getting them swapped we're getting zero to 1 3 etc so that's the wrong field order we go back to video filters you can double click on a filter to go back into its dialog which I just did and we're going to change the field order from bottom field first to top now hit OK now when I single step forward by hitting only the right arrow key the motion is correct again don't look at this at the before window look at the after window I'm going to go forward with arrow keys 1 2 3 4 5 and as you can see going forward it's perfect and that believe it or not is it you have just now captured and setup video to be correct you've handled interlaced video correctly give yourself a pat on the back back not even YouTube is doing this correctly if you upload an interlaced video to YouTube they throw away one of the fields so you're already ahead of the game now we're still in the editor we need to save this out to a new file so that it's actually useful so for that let's pick a video codec and for that we go to video compression and again pick a lossless codec again this is going to result in a fairly large file but the file is temporary we're going to compress it using handbrake later in the tutorial I'm going to stay with the same lossless codec I picked before which is UT video again you can use anything you like as long as it's lossless lagertha is a popular choice Hough why UV is another choice but I'm going to use UT video so let's hit OK and then to save out your changes to a new file you just do save as avi let's go ahead and pick the same directory but this time I'm going to call this processed capture and after some churning we have saved it out now I'm going to go ahead and play this file let's exit virtualdub let's actually play the file and make sure that it is as smooth as I promised it would be I'm actually going to play this with Windows Media Player because Windows Media Player does a pretty good job of maintaining 60 frames per second I sound strange but it's true so let's go ahead and do this and I'll zoom it fullscreen okay I have the audio disabled so nice and smooth good motion everything looks great let's make sure it actually did the audio yep audio came through just fine now that we know our file is perfectly fine it's time to encode it to mpeg-4 now if you're not uploading to YouTube we can go straight to encoding it to mpeg-4 and this would be if you wanted to give it to somebody upload it to Facebook put it on Plex or something like that YouTube requires an extra step so if YouTube is your real destination then stick around because I will cover that a little bit later on in this tutorial for now though let's go ahead and encode it to mpeg-4 for that we're going to start handbrake handbrake is a free video encoding tool it is mostly used for converting movies but there's nothing wrong with us using it for our own purposes let's remove some distractions here and it couldn't be easier to use we have our processed video capture here all we have to do is hit the source button or file source open a file pick our processed capture and then make sure we our container is mp4 if you really love Matroska video or MKV you could pick that but I prefer in peg 4 and then simply go to the video tab and do 59.94 frames per second constant framerate and then that is really it if you want to force slightly better quality you can move the constant quality slider up to 18 but the default of 20 is usually usually good enough actually I'm a bit of a stickler for quality so I tend to slide it up to 18 and then all you have to do is start and it starts encoding the video and this is a short one so it's going to be done really fast and then we have our processed capture now it's an mpeg-4 format and as you can see the size is reduced drastically but if we play it it is still hated go to still the same smooth motion all the detail is there we're all good now if you're not uploading to YouTube you're done but if you are uploading to YouTube there's something you need to know YouTube only recognizes files as having 60 frames per second if they are 720 lines or more and if you want to upload to YouTube and retain all of that smoothness and fluidity you're going to have to resize the video so that it's 720 lines I will show you a quick example of how to do that right now let's fire up virtualdub and get back to where we were we had loaded the raw capture and just for giggles I'll remove this corruption again like we did previously remember that we had added our deinterlacing filter so here I am doing video filter D interlace and we found that our field date was top field first now we're ready let's just single step and make sure okay if this is going to be uploaded to YouTube we need to resize it to be at least 720 lines so we have to add another filter video filter ad and then pick the resize filter now for this not only does it need to be 720 lines or more and you can see when I did that it adjusted the other number as well while we're resizing we have the opportunity to correct the aspect ratio so I'm actually going to disable this and pick the correct number which is actually 960 960 by 720 is a four by three aspect ratio with square pixels so this is going to resize it and it's going to look just fine on YouTube now the filter mode this is just what resizing method you use we're enlarging so there's not a whole lot of difference between the precise bicubic and the land so I'm just going to leave it at precise bicubic we hit okay we hit okay and now watch the left side window you'll notice it's bigger that's because we now have a resize filter applied we single step through this we can still see it looks fine it's just simply bigger 960 lines sorry 960 pixels across by 720 lines down now we continue again with the saving we pick a a codec I'm still picking the same lossless codec I used before and again file save as I and that's pretty much it now I'm just going to call this export for YouTube now this takes a little longer because the file is bigger you'll also see that it's almost double the size I know this is alarming but remember this file is like the last one a temporary file that you're only using for this export and editing so here's our export for YouTube it's pretty big but the encoding process is exactly the same you bring it into handbrake you pick 59.94 frames per second that's because that is the stock field rate of NTSC analog video and save it out and you're done and then you'll have something that you can upload to YouTube and it will be just as smooth and fluid as you saw in the very beginning of this tutorial so I hope that was useful for you if you have any further questions or comments please feel free to leave them the there are lots of extended topics I could have gone into like noise reduction or cropping or things like that and those are more advanced topics for another day the main point of this tutorial was to get you understanding what interlaced video is and how to process it correctly and I hope you've learned something thanks for watching

Channel: The Oldskool PC

Views: 752,237

Rating: 4.9254088 out of 5

Keywords: vintage, computing, retro, videotape, vhs, conversion, digital video, analog video

Id: sn_TDa9zY1c

Length: 28min 34sec (1714 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 04 2016