Is this VHS or SVHS?

[zoob]

I had some guy transfer SVHS to DVD on eBay. What I got back makes me suspicious that he popped my SVHS tape into his combo unit and recorded to disc. Other tapes were way out of audio sync. I had asked him prior if his deck was a real SVHS and he said yes.

How do I determine whether this is VHS or SVHS resolution?
I may have to send my tapes to a real house for conversion.

Included attachments are VLC snapshots from the DVD.

 

[GavinAbe]

I do transfer on a daily base , the only way he is able to transfer Svhs is via a Svhs machine, but saying that he could have usesd a very cheap usb convertor the picture would be poor and you would have sinc problems, We found the best way is to run the SVHS thru our 8head Svhs machine thru a TBC on to a Realtime dvd recorder set at 1 hour setting which is about 7000kbs audio LMPC. Having a look at the pictures I cannot say if they are vhs or Svhs as the are to small, but The first picture looks like a Svhs which is a poor encode or degraded You did not say if it is NTSC or PAL Pal-i tends to have a better picture than NTSC . We fine Tape has about a 10 yr life span before they start to degrade, it all depends on how and where you stored it. Hope this helps
gavin

 

[zoob]

It's NTSC and the pics are actually 720x540. DVXuser has resized and transcoded them to jpgs.
I've pointed to a full size shot here: image and image2

 

[paulears]

I'd agree that he must have used a S-VHS machine, otherwise there would be no image - but output quality will be variable because S-VHS material does not always look much different from VHS - The key factors are how the video output gets to the DVD recorder. If it goes via y/c it will retain a bit more detail than composite - so it easy to throw away some of the S-VHS extra quality. The unacceptable part is the audio. If the audio is delayed, reject the material - it's unacceptable. I have a S-VHS machine connected to a cheap DVD recorder and have been doing some transfers recently and there is no audio delay, and the picture quality looks ok, when the source tapes are decent quality. I can clearly see the difference between S-VHS and VHS source - BUT - lots of S-VHS tapes I'm provided are actually no better quality than VHS because they were recorded from low quality sources. If you are unhappy, reject the material as unacceptable, using the sound delay as the reason. You will only find out about the picture when you have the same material done elsewhere. Looking at the two images makes me wonder if they are actually copies of copies - the sky in the colour one, and the b/w in the other. They don't look like 1st generation copies - and just being on a S-VHS tape doesn't mean they contain the extra detail. Are you positive it's there when you play the tapes on your machine?

 

[zoob]

I was working on that house pic's sky and must have goofed. Anyway, they are prints of stills that went directly to SVHS via a Hi8 cam with studio lighting. You're probably right in that I should try again and compare...this time using a official house to transfer.

 

[nosys70]

i find picture pretty good for s-vhs. sound is another story.
both picture have been obvioulsy denoised, this process always makes image softer.

there is a strange artifact in the blue sky of first picture, like if somebody triend to paint with mouse.

That is the proof the recording has been made properly and attempt to improve picture has been done.
bottom of picture shows some artifact indicating that head alignement was not perfect, put the vertical lines
on both pictures are perfect, indicating a good reading

 

[zoob]

The blue sky was my mistake.
I find sharpening these images in an image editor really helps a lot.