Hi, I'm posting here since I lack the 100 karma (tf is karma?) needed to post on archivists.
PLEASE, read the whole post before commenting. Most people tend to comment stuff I've already rendered moot in the post itself, very specifically! This is a discussion, but redundant explanations shouldn't be necessary.
I think I have a pretty decent way of digitizing and archiving VHS tapes that doesn't take crap tons of storage for no good reason.
First, I somehow just... have an S-VHS VCR which I've since learned is kind of rare, but it has S-Video ins and outs, so I decided to try to plug that into my Sony miniDV camcorder which apparently from that I learned that the port on the camera is actually bidirectional. So, I connected it up, and then I connected that camcorder to a 2011 17" MacBook Pro over FireWire, and opened QuickTimePlayer.
For the audio (which S-Video does not carry), I connected the RCAs coming out of the VCR straight into the MacBook Pro's audio line in port (with a combiner in the middle to turn the 2 RCAs into a 3.5) - This is a reason I am using such an old Mac for this.
In QuickTimePlayer, I choose new movie, which basically opens a webcam recording interface, which the camcorder and line in show up as options for video and audio input, respectively. I choose maximum recording quality (which is ProRes 422 and 32-bit PCM), as supposed to high recording quality (which is H264 at god knows what bitrate and AAC I think), hit record on the interface, and quickly hit play on the VCR... unless the footage I'm trying to capture is 16:9, rare but it happens and I just have to wait a couple more seconds for it to figure out what's going on or it would just be... incorrectly displayed and recorded.
Now, I think the camcorder is converting the analog signal to DV, the codec, at 25Mbps. This probably isn't ideal for obvious reasons, the worst of which is that I haven't been able to come up with a good way of just getting this DV data from the camera. I have tried iMovie and Final Cut Pro X, but the problem is the audio. I can't "select" where the audio comes from in these programs, so I'm stuck with plugging that RCA combiner thing into the camcorder's A/V jack instead of the MacBook's line in, and that WOULD have worked, but the camcorder's input there is so.. awful, and introduces loads of audio popping and other artifacts, it's just horrible, so I just won't use that.
The problem, though, with the ProRes 422 option I've been doing is that.. well.. that's a LOT of data to be pushing onto a 2011 2.5" hard drive. If I'm doing basically anything else on the laptop while recording, it'll lag the recording and that'll end up in the finished video file. Also, I some tapes take 45 minutes to rip, some take 9 hours, and I won't really know how long until they're done, which means I have to either sit there waiting for it to be done for however long it is, or go on with my life and check back in on it every hour or so. I've picked the second option.. except I do sleep every night, so that goes from maximum 55 minutes of useless blue screen footage after the tape was done that got recorded to possibly over 5 hours of this crap. No worries, right? - QuickTimePlayer has this super useful and quick trimming feature! Yea... the problem is that... with files this large, bigger than 100GB and some larger than 150GB, for some stupid reason, when I cut one of those by any length, it seems to require to write the entire video file's size MORE THAN TIMES ITSELF to the disk, which at 20-30MB/s, is just.. I could have used that time to import the next damn tape... oh and the disk probably doesn't even have enough storage left over from the recording itself to even do this nonsense! - Soooo that turned into me just saving the entire thing, 5 hours of blue screen and all, to a network share that runs on a Mac mini that is not starved of resources and has over 10TB to work with on its bad days, which of course takes about as long as the edits would, but I can actually start the next tape importing while that goes on... somehow. Everything else lags the recording, but not that, very strange. Then when that's done saving to the share about 3-6 hours later, I can close that file within QuickTimePlayer, and that'll delete the video file from the local storage, so yay! That's freed up now for the new recording, and the cycle repeats like this.
I did try putting an SSD into this MacBook, but I couldn't for the life of me get god damn 10.13 to install no matter what I did, Internet Recovery, DosDude patcher, USB boot, nothing freaking worked, so I was either going to have to go eldrich abomination mode to get an OS on that SSD and then put it in, or just cope with what I actually had going already, and I picked the last one.
Ok, so, I have the files, and I am able to finally trim them using QuickTimePlayer on the M2 Pro Mac Mini, and that works great. Now I have 130GB files instead of 165GB files. Still too big. Something not everyone knows is that H264 is... strange. The amount of power you use to make it do its thing is what determines how efficient the encoding, and this how good a video file using it looks for a given bitrate, is. I don't want to lose anything that I can help losing, so I have an encoding PC dedicated to this task. Extreme encoding. CPU, GPU, everything. The CPU is a 13900k and the GPU is a 4060. Since this is only SD video, I just set it to CPU encode to give it the most efficient "placebo" encoding preset for x264, basically just means software encoding H264. So I told the Handbrake program to do this, and I got my final video files that I can do whatever with. Oh also at a bitrate of 5Mbps. Oh and Handbrake was programmed by fish so it doesn't have audio passthrough (HUHHH!?!?), so I had to freaking convert the 32-bit PCM into E-AC3 at 3072Kbps, which seemed good enough. I don't know how much I'm losing though, I just made sure the bitrates were the same.
Oh and I forgot to mention that, to make the camera notice and use the S-Video input capability it has, I have to go into VCR mode on the camcorder, then go into "REC CONTROL", and basically just hit a control of some kind, and I've picked the "pause" control, since it doesn't seem to do much of anything except make it notice the input which is all I wanted anyway. Then it'll send its stuff out the FireWire port to the MacBook where that can be captured in QuickTimePlayer.
This is the best I can get my system with the limitations put in place by what I have as far as I know, but if anyone has any tips, like how I can get the actual DV data that the video analog video is being converted to within the camera with an audio input selector. Basically the iMovie capture way but with an audio input selection.
I'm typing all of this out at 2AM so if I'm leaving anything out or if anyone has any questions, let me know. Also I have no idea if this is the place for this crap, I just can't post where I know for sure it would be for a dumb reason.
2AM setup picture
