#analog digitizing

Did another "previews on an ancient dubbed anime VHS" capture. This one is from the first Escaflowne VHS and since they figured the only people buying an Escaflowne VHS are older weebs, instead of selling toys it's just some trailers for other anime:

Cowboy Bebop

Blue Submarine No. 6

good news everyone! I got a new monitor specifically because I wanted one that's color accurate for the purposes of digitizing SD footage. I spent this morning playing with it and testing it out and I am very pleased.

so, my personal approach to digitizing analog footage is I try to capture how it looks on my CRT TV as closely as possible, because to me that's how the games look their best. I love how those TVs capture light and darkness and colors. And since I got this hauppauge TV tuner, I feel like I'm finally able to capture something that looks really close.

I modified the procamp settings on this card so the brightness, contrast, hue, and saturation are all tweaked to get it as close as possible visually. I think it looks really good. Now for truly lossless capture I would capture the raw .avi in virtualdub, but for sharing on most platforms I feel like encoding it onto an HD canvas makes the most sense. So this is the interlaced and recorded in obs. I preserved the 720 pixel width of the footage and stretched it horizontally to make it the 4x3 aspect ratio.

2018: webcam pointed at an HDTV displaying cropped footage.

I just wanted to see if I could speedrun the game solo, it was not worth investing in proper capture hardware until I knew I was ready to commit to the hobby.

Still 2018: Elgato Game Capture HD, came recommended for retro capture on the first page of a lazy Google search; also worked* on MacOS, which was my only available OS at the time.

* “Works” is, apparently, a subjective concept. It was an improvement over a webcam pointed at a TV, but for the price of the damn thing and the headaches it came with, the footage looked worse than it should have.

2019: Amplified signal splitter feeding a TV on one end and a GV-USB2 capture card on the other. Colors were intentionally desaturated in card proc amp settings (slightly too much, due to my monitor not being calibrated properly).

Recommended on a google doc authored by Melee streamers. This setup also allowed for using a CRT TV to play with no lag whatsoever. The signal splitter and capture card combined cost me what the Elgato HD had originally, and my setup gave me better quality and way more flexibility.

EDIT: Here is a link to the document, by EvilAsh25.

I somewhat regret not doing better research earlier, but I had also been limited by whatever “worked” on MacOS.

2022: Same signal splitter that I set up 3 years ago, now with a Hauppauge WinTV HVR 1250 TV Tuner card on the receiving end instead.

This card’s proc amp settings allow me to get the picture extremely close to ideal. I made a 10-minute video gushing about this card and its marginal but very effective (to me) improvements compared to the GV-USB2.

I have learned so much about the nature of analog video signals and the processes behind digitizing them. That Melee document was the most useful resource for me to get started, and from there I started also learning about tools and techniques from folks in A/V digitizing and restoration.

I don’t stretch the footage as much anymore, since 720x480 needs to be inherently distorted on a digital canvas to display as 4:3. Instead I preserve the horizontal dimension and only stretch the verticals, so that when a browser resizes the image yet again, it is less distorted to start with and generally a cleaner final picture. This makes it smaller on the canvas - more space to get creative with the background!

...of course on the Tumblr post it is just being smooshed again because these screenshots are already distorted, but such is the nature of posting things on the internet.

I recently joined an arts server, and based on the prompt for a community event, I arranged a cover of “Water Symphony” from Tales of Symphonia, recorded it via camcorder (cello) and RCA-out (keyboard) with my analog capture card, and overlaid a digitized photo I took with an instax analog camera of a lot of old memories and keepsakes.

My interpretation of the prompt is more or less about engaging with my memories in a way that feels authentic. Original prompt below:

I’ve been replaying Ocarina of Time because someone found a way to inject the OoT v1 onto a Wii and I haven’t played v1 since I was a little kid and was curious and because of who I am as a person, have also been digitizing it using my Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1250 capture card. I’ve done a lot of tweaking to the card’s proc amp settings to get the footage to look as close to how it looks on my CRT TV as possible; I really like how these captures look compared to what I could get on my GV-USB2. This card is really good at capturing contrast and darkness, and that’s part of what makes old games look so much more alive on old TVs.