Capturing footage from VHS?

V

vt2la

Member
I need to bring some VHS footage into Final Cut for a reel I'm cutting and am wondering what the best method is. I have FCP 5.1.4 on a MacPro 2x3Ghz dual core & 4 gb memory. I also have access to the HVX200.

I was thinking of hooking a VCR up to the camera through component cables and running the firewire into the computer and capturing as if it were mini-dv footage. But I've never actually tried to do this. Does it work?

Also, will the type of VCR effect the quality/ability to view the tapes? The VCR/DVD combo at the office is supposedly a pretty nice one but I've been having an issue viewing some of the tapes on it. The tapes are very old, probably ranging from 15-20 years so the picture quality is probably pretty bad to begin with. When I try to play some of them on the vcr, it just shows a scrambled image, however, when you fastforward or rewind the tape, you can see the image quite clearly. This happens with four or five of the tapes, and the scrambled image looks exactly the same on each one, just a strange "snow"-like image. What I'm assuiming is happening is that the vcr isn't accepting the low quality image, so it outputs the scrabled image I'm seeing. Could this be the case, or are the tapes just too degraded to work any longer? Thanks for any help.
 
You can certainly do that - just make sure to set FCP capture setting to "Non-Controllable Device".

However, for better quality, if you do this a lot, you may want to pick up a VHS deck that has a DV output (I have an old VHS/MiniDV combo deck from JVC that does this; I think some of the VHS/DVD-R decks might have the same functionality...)

-Barry
 
the procedure you describe is called "pass-thru" and it works very well. You may need to reset some camera menu items like "DV Out", and some cameras will not do pass-thru unless the tape is removed,

the problem you describe with the tapes sounds like tracking error. do you have manual tracking control?
 
Thanks for the help. I'm doing the first pass-thru right now and it seems to be working great. The tracking issue is an issue with the VCR we were using, the heads are done for. Hopefully we don't end up doing this type of stuff too often, it's been really hard to find a vhs deck anywhere. Let alone a vhs/dv combo. The only one I've found online is a JVC that has gotten terrible reviews.
 
Yeah - the JVC has gotten terrible reviews; the MiniDV deck is pretty much unusable, but it does fine with VHS...
 
Hi,
I had a similar situation with doing some very old videos at the start of the year (and I remember specifically being able to see everything clearly in fastforward). The way I got it to work was to hook up the RCA cables from the VCR to my camera (DVX), to put hte camera into VCR mode and to push record on the camera (with a mini-dv tape in of course) and play on the VCR. For me this seemed to record everything from the VCR onto the mini-dv tape. Then I rewound the mini-dv tape and captured it into FCP. This worked relatively well considering the age of the tapes, etc.
Also, something I have found in the past. FCP can be really picky and sometimes has difficulty capturing low quality clips (probably a setting somewhere that I haven't found). When this happens continually when importing old VHS footage I just use iMovie as it captures errors and all (which doesn't matter as the original footage has plenty of issues).
 
Final Cut Pro doesn't examine the quality of the signal. All it cares about is communication with the device is hooked up to. And with firewire sets, then if its communicating with the device its also seeing video and hearing audio, as all 3 items come through together. I can capture snow off my VHS if I want. And in fact, when having had to do some capturing of Video 8 (not hi8, not digital8, but video 8), I've hit capture now before I started playing video (so I could preserve every frame), and FCP has happily recorded a blank image until the footage actually started to play.

However, if the VHS is creating problems for the VCR, then that might affect FCP. If the VCR feeds the camera and the camera FCP, and your VCR is having issues, well follow the chain. That might do it, but its not an FCP problem there.

Taking your VHS to mini-DV is pretty good way to go. Just that if its a one off that you'll never need again you end up burning stock and double your workload (time wise). It does give you a couple of nice payoffs though. You give better future protection to the footage now that its on miniDV. And on miniDV you give your footage timecode. So you could log and load it and put it in like a stock footage project file, for your own records, and then you could always quickly retrieve it. So definitely a good way to go, but not always viable depending on time constraints.

cheers.
 
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