Using OBS to Capture Videotapes with a USB Capture Device on Windows

in this video we'll be discussing using obs to capture videotapes and just one thing before i get started i'm assuming you're capturing these videotapes for use on a modern device like a computer or a phone and i'm assuming you're okay with them being fairly highly compressed i'll do a separate video on lossless capture using obs but for now just know that i'm assuming you're going to be using these on a computer or a phone something like that and i'll briefly discuss the settings you'll need in case you want to author the files to a dvd so what you'll need for this to work you'll need a functioning device to play back your tapes vcr or what have you you'll need rca cables and or an s video cable depending on your device you'll need some kind of a converter a usb converter for example to capture your video i used let's pull it up here i use this one it's around 40 bucks and i use this one because it captures audio and stereo and it also captures fields as well as frames and we'll get into that a little bit but basically some of the other devices that i was trying only capture frames so i like the fact that this one lets me de-interlace if i want to or allows me to capture fields and frames and it captures in stereo so that's great so if you purchase that device the one from amazon you'll need to install the drivers either from the cd they provided or go to their website and download them the website is here it's startech.com i'll link this in the description below but you're looking for the driver which is here in the drivers and downloads tab go ahead and download that extract the zip and when you do that you'll find there's a windows folder and there's a mac folder i haven't tested this on a mac i don't have a mac to test this on but if you're on windows like me just open up the windows folder and run the setup file here that'll install the driver and you can go ahead and plug in the device and once the device is plugged in it should work to verify that the drivers are installed correctly you can go to the device manager you can right click on the windows icon here go to device manager that way or click on windows type in device and there's device manager there you're looking for the sound video and game controllers and specifically you want the usb 2828x audio device and usb 2828x device those are the drivers for the usb adapter that you want to work with okay and if that's all installed and ready to go you want to install obs so to do that go to obsproject.com and these buttons will take you to the individual downloads for your operating system and once that's up and running go ahead and launch obs and when obs first launches for the first time you're gonna get this auto configuration wizard that pops up automatically go ahead and cancel out of it you don't need to use this we're not using obs and the way it's traditionally used so just cancel out of that and let's discuss the settings within obs that you're going to be concerned with so two ways to get to the settings you can go to the settings button here or go to file and choose settings okay so these are the settings so the first thing to go to is the output tab and you want to go to the recording tab and then output mode make sure you choose advanced it's probably defaulting to simple you want advanced standard is the type you want for this here's your recording path so when you hit this that is where your file will be saved on your computer so just browse to the location where you want your file to be saved wherever that may be and select folder and that's all set you can choose to generate a file name without space you don't have to i did the recording format for what we're trying to do here is mp4 there's other options here but we're going to choose mp4 for this audio track you want one and that's going to be one track that is stereo so it's okay you don't have to have two tracks for stereo it'll be one track that is stereo for the encoder choose x.264 there's other options in here depending on your computer okay i have some here but everyone by default gets x.264 so i'm gonna go ahead and just use that you don't need to re-scale the output we'll get into that in a little bit and then rate control you want cbr it might have defaulted the crf choose cbr and for the purposes of what we're trying to do here which is a compressed mp4 file you can type in 3500 kbps so just type in 3500 all right you don't need to use custom buffer size keyframe interval 0 cpu usage this is a setting that basically determines how hard your processor is working as it digitizes this material so oddly enough slower means more work being done by the processor so if you're noticing as you're recording that your recordings are stuttering or the playback is stuttering you may have this set to a you know a placebo or a very slow so just play with these depending on what's happening on your machine i'll choose medium for that profiles none and tune you want film and this you can leave blank and then one more thing in here if you're recording for the use of burning a dvd the recording format you want to use is ts and your bit rate is going to be around 7 500 but i am going to stick with for this tutorial i'll stick with 3500 and i'll stick with mp4 for my file type and then we'll go to the audio tab for audio bitrate i've chosen 320. you can choose 192 if you want obviously the higher the number the higher the quality so if you want to do 320 it's fine then go to the audio section make sure sample rate is 48 kilohertz and stereo next go to video and you're going to want to type in this is not something that is a drop down option so you want to type in 720 by 480 okay output scaled resolution this is the resolution of your file that's going to be saved by obs so there's two things you can do here if you're going to play this back on a modern device like a computer or smartphone or you're putting this on youtube something like that you want to use square pixels and to do that you'll type in 720 by 540 and that's going to be a square pixel aspect ratio for pal you'll type in 768 by 576 and that'll be square pixel aspect for pal but i'm using ntsc so i'll keep mine at 720 by 540. if you're going to be using this for creating files for authoring a dvd you can keep this at 720 by 480. okay but for these purposes and what i'm talking about in this tutorial i'm going to use 720 by 540. all right downscale filter you can keep it as is and then common fps values if you're using ntsc this should be 29.97 if you're using pal this should be 25 pal all right we're going to stick with 29.97 for that okay the last thing in here is go to the advanced settings and you're interested in this area up here where it says video so because you're capturing analog video and the color space should be 601 color format can stay at nb12 but 601 is the main thing here 709 is hd 601 is sd color space that's the main thing so 601 is what you want and color range color range on sd video is actually partial so choose partial and then click apply click ok and your settings are all set alright so you want to add a video source now and to do that click on the plus icon here and you want to choose video capture device so click on that and then name your device i'm going to call mine vhs capture you can call yours whatever you like make sure make source visible is checked and push ok this window pops up and this is where you pick the device you're going to use to capture your video so if you purchase the device i recommended from amazon you're going to choose the usb 2828x device here okay so there we see a signal from my vcr it's not playing anything so it's showing blue so the first thing we want to do here is click on configure crossbar and this will let us choose our input source whether it's s video or rca and that's right here so right now we have video composite and i'm actually using an rca cable for this so that's correct but if i was using s video i would choose s video in but i'm not i'm choosing composite here because i'm using rca and the rest of this you can leave alone you're just concerned with whether you're using rca or s video and that's where you would use that so click ok and the next thing we want to do is click on configure video all right so click on vcr input and then if you're using ntsc you can leave it at ntscm if you're using pal there are options in here for pal and then pick the flavor or type of pal you're using if you're familiar if not you may need to look it up but those options are all in here i'm going to stick with ntsc for mine and then you have some options in here for brightness contrast hue saturation so if you need to play with these settings they are in here and there's some other options in here i really don't mess with these too much i do sometimes play with the brightness contrast settings etc in this menu so once that's all set up click ok and then where it says resolution fps type you're going to want to pick custom so choose custom for resolution as soon as i push 7 it puts in 720 by 480 automatically and then i'll choose 29.97 from the fps drop down let's resize this a bit so we can see more of the interface okay video format any is fine color space you want 601 color range you want partial buffering that's fine this is important where it says use custom audio device when i click use custom audio device this will actually add a custom audio device in my obs interface and i'll show you that in a second so click that and then make sure you're choosing the correct audio device in this case we're going to want line usb 2828x audio device that's the startech.com device so choose that click okay and here we go so here's our video capture that's working i have a blue screen and here's my vhs capture audio and i'll push play here in a second and you'll see levels moving in this section here i'll go ahead and push play on my vcr and you can see video and audio are both playing a couple things here if you don't like these black bars on the side that's called over scan you can actually resize this output just hold the shift key down to maintain the aspect ratio grab these little handles and then drag to the right on this side drive to the left on this side until the black bars disappear and then if you want to put this back to where it was right click choose transform and choose fit to screen and it puts it right back okay now the other thing here i'm going to push stop real quick the other thing here is if you want you can choose to have obs de-interlace your footage i'm not going to really get into what interlacing is too deeply but basically and lots of flavors of video frames are made up of two fields essentially what happens is that you get these weird lines these weird jagged lines when there's a lot of movement so you probably don't want to have that happening in your resulting file so you can choose to de-interlace it the way to do that is to click on your video source right-click go to de-interlacing and choose yetif 2x and make sure that top field first is checked if you're using the device i recommended so yeah f2x turn that on and now de-interlacing is turned on if you're capturing this for authoring a dvd you don't need to choose the interlacing you actually want the file to be interlaced for your dvd playback it'll still work if it's the interlaced but traditionally when you're authoring a dvd the files are interlaced all right so next is your audio mixer i'm gonna push play again and you should see levels as you can see here i'm seeing levels and they're playing in stereo if you want to hear the audio this little gear icon here click on that go to advanced audio properties and choose monitor and output when i click this you're going to hear audio he thought that metallica would be the perfect fan to put together with the symphony orchestra so although i also like i also like the answer that uh metallica hasn't hit the grandparents demo yet well it's the one that back off so if you want to hear your audio as you play your video back that's how you would do it again that's advanced audio properties choose monitor and output metallica song ever written we sat with him for like okay an audio will be playing all right so if you're ready to record everything's all set up and ready to go so i'm gonna push play and i'll just start recording and you can see here it's recording record your the amount of time it's recorded so far is being counted here the start recording button turned into a stop recording button and i can also pause it if i want all right and when i'm done just push stop recording okay stop my playback and then i'll go find my file and where was that file again well that was in my settings under output recording right here that's where i'll find my file so i'm going to go ahead and copy that path open windows explorer and i'll just paste that path in and let's view details sort by date and there is my recording right there double click the 20 best of those so it was a long process it took about a year and a half to get this thing together but and we're about to world premiere um all right so that worked and that is how you record video using obs and that should be enough to get you going and i hope this helped you guys

Channel: Tim Ford

Views: 94,411

Keywords: OBS, Open Broadcaster Software, Digitize VHS, VHS

Id: G2CIEE8kjSU

Length: 15min 1sec (901 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 18 2022