the idea was simple we backed up our lives on VHS tapes and anytime we wanted
all we had to do was pop one into the VCR and be transported together into our
Precious Memories it was a simpler time
one that has led to today's complicated problem here are a couple of tapes I
found in my attic complete with never before seen footage from my student
exchange to Montreal except anyone still
got a VHS player no
anyone no sir I do not not anymore
maybe if I just open it up and hold it up
that's a tape right oh hi Mark by the
way these are not film so acting out what's on them is not as
simple as just looking through them into a light source Mark is our resident
expert on digitizing VHS footage and he's going to help me today first to
find out if there's anything on these and second to recover them with the
greatest possible quality oh and third he's also going to help me segue to our
sponsor crucial crucial's ssds ensure you're not wasting time on boot up or
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affordable check them out at the link below what am I even looking at here
this is uh this is York Lake in Yorkton
Saskatchewan I think this doesn't look great no no and that would be just the
poor recording quality at the time or has this been degraded uh it's a number
of factors so it's the tape itself was recorded in super long Play It's
degraded it's from the early 80s and uh
probably some other factors too right out of the gate we've got some potential
problems here my tapes have been in storage for over 10 years in my attic
and two of the biggest enemies of VHS are heat in the summer and moisture
which here on the wet Coast is definitely going to seep into your attic
what are the odds that these are going to work at all well this one's from 2003
so very likely uh that's not that long the
time is a factor how long are these things supposed to last usually 10 to 25
years but I've had tapes this tape is from the early 80s it sure is yeah
yep that's my aunt okay cool uh even if
these are in great condition that doesn't necessarily help me play them back now you told me that VHS players
have gotten rare and expensive but eBay is full of players for like 30 bucks so
how do you account for that those can be hit or miss like a lot of them were just
from storage containers they say tested but that doesn't
guarantee anything sure and this is analog right so just because it's
working doesn't mean that it's going to look any good and if all you wanted to
do was watch it and be like Oh Auntie
Mark Santi or whatever then that's fine but it's a huge issue if you want to
preserve your tapes in the long run by digitizing them because garbage in
garbage out you want the best possible read on the tape especially if you want
to have any hope of maybe say AI upscaling it when that technology you
know continues to advance in the future yeah and also VHS players or VCRs can
just eat your tape the moment you put it in and then gone you know right I mean
unless you have like a Star Wars like budget to remaster it no no this was how
I originally imagined my childhood with due backs and a weird alien musical
number I also imagined this enhanced larger
version of our LTT water bottle for exactly the same price lttstore.com so
then if what I want is a quality VHS player I mean what am I looking for then
there's some general rules first of all you want a VCR with at least four heads
more is better but four is what is a head oh a tape head so it's what reads
the tape oh so it's essentially doing like four passes of it as it goes by
like four scans and taking like an average or what something like that it's
spinning I see so it's the way that they stored video on tapes from this era and
then what else do we want you mentioned something about TBC yes so ideally you
want to get a VCR with a TBC they're a little bit hard to find now and you can
also get an external one basically it fixes most of the issues that you have
with analog video squiggly lines signal
artifacts color being yeah color being
skewed got it yeah and then I'm assuming outputs matter because you're not going
to get the best quality ingest if you're outputting via composite or something
like that so what do we want yeah ideally s video composite does work but
if you have a unit with s video You're golden okay now there are a handful of
models like the AG 1980p that the
community knows our good bang for the buck or like the best one but here's the
thing about VHS there were many hundreds probably thousands of different players
in the 80s and 90s and that was a time
when the internet either didn't exist or wasn't as readily accessible so a lot of
the community knowledge about VHS tapes and about VHS players was very poorly
documented compared to let's say today you were trying to learn about mod
shipping a PS2 or even if you were trying to do that 20 years from now some
of those articles some of that knowledge will remain here yeah it's a little it's
a little tougher to find so someone like me might say well no problem uh here's a
professional grade VHS player for a thousand dollars surely that one will be
awesome right you would think that but if you have any
tapes recorded in super long play right you know in EP mode yeah yeah yeah yeah
uh it will not play it back I almost made that mistake when I was purchasing
this unit that could be a very costly mistake and that would be such a classic
dad move wait so it can record two hours
in this mode but six hours in this mode surely I want the six hour mode right
pretty much all of my tapes are recorded like that and regardless of whether you
go consumer grade or professional grade for your VHS player it's an old device
and there's a chance you're going to need to get it serviced or refurbished and again back in the 90s I don't think
you could throw a rock without hitting a VCR or TV repair shop but these days
there are few of these craftspeople left working and the cost can easily run you
into the many hundreds of dollars thankfully Mark here got a copy on what
I'm told is a 1980 p uh before price is
evidently skyrocketed I love that you told me this is bang for the buck and then I look it up on eBay it's over a
grand yeah so how much did you pay for it I paid 400 US Dollars 400 US Dollars
even that is pretty yikes but aside from
the Rarity of the players themselves there's other equipment that's required
for a high quality capture that has also gotten harder to get your hands on so
why don't you walk us through what I'm looking at here this is your analog to
SDI digital converter from Blackmagic
yeah they don't sell this anymore do they uh I couldn't find it but I
apparently they do oh yeah I I found it
online but I could not find it in b h so I had to get the second hand and
currently it's connected to composite out but I do have the ability to go from
s video out it works better on some tapes than others got it I found so both
options okay you can do the same thing with a ossc but this has more Creature
Comforts for what I'm doing sure like what tell me something this will do that
an osse wouldn't uh you have a lot more standards right here oh interesting wait
you can do beta yeah you can do beta shut up yeah yeah okay well that's
pretty cool so there's a whole bunch of different standards uh you can turn off
post-processing ossc will get you there
though as well so that's another alternative and then this is more
straightforward this is just a simple SDI video capture device yeah
Thunderbolt cool yep okay well that's relatively straightforward this doesn't
look cheap either though is there a cheap and cheerful way to do this technology connections did a video on
transferring VHS tapes a while back I love that channel yeah yeah he's great
and his setup was a much more affordable sure and I'm assuming just like an old
like TV tuner card or something like that well no he went down that route but
he ended up going with an upscaler so analog to HDMI upscaler with a capture
card that's basically all this is without the upscale got it because for
our purposes is we want as close to the original data as possible exactly is
this as simple as just popping this into the player at this point like you had
said that you've run into some issues where you've had to restore the tapes
yeah so these are all in Fairly good condition but we think we think but just
visually you can see there's no mold more or anything in here yeah yeah mold
you say yes and that is uh that's the
moisture okay yeah and then I guess you could also have damaged housings even
though these have been in the hot like as hot as 40 degrees celsius during the
summer they haven't been in direct sunlight sunlight
probably we're done right pretty much heat your it's not recommended but it
can hold up a little better it's ABS plastic so well I was more worried about
the the tape yeah this is the one that
is more important so I kind of want to start with this one should we just pop
it in and see what happens go for it okay it's rewound I still remember left
is rewound be kind please rewind right I never re-round you Jack
this one wait are you are you messing with me
nope this is what was on here for real
for real okay because I had no idea what was on this but it was in my like
sentimental memories
no I was wait what is this it went to Survivor wait this is Survivor wait so
we got just the intro yeah it's a minute no it goes into it it's the 90s they do
what am I looking at is this just all commercials yeah it's
just no it's a recording of friends oh my God and then after friends
no but after this it's The Simpsons I was never into friends and I never even
had cable TV yeah so does that not raise
any questions for you where would I have gotten this tape Z
bonds no no it probably belongs to my
high school girlfriend she was into friends
and for those of you wondering out there this was how we
um watched TV on demand yeah this is
Netflix it's Plex actually yeah 90s Plex
still the commercial yeah oh my god there were so many commercials you see
the one thing this VCR does not have is
a commercial Skipper right you remember in the 90s they had those and everybody
wanted those how did they know I actually did not know that those were a
thing yeah it was a thing I I honestly don't know the I know the sound mixing
was like higher for commercials yeah they could detect that I'm just guessing
right now though well one other thing this has no macro which means I can play
back and copy over commercial tapes oh
really yeah so DRM in the 90s was called
macro Vision this has none of it cool can I just point out how much better
this looks on the CRT than it does over
here on the LCD the color's a little off
but that's just a function of our capture setup but the just that
it just looks better scan lines versus pixels yeah and and it would look even
better if it was a direct feed from the VCR yeah and if it wasn't just like a
crappy copy that my like ex-girlfriend made onto her crappy VHS with her crappy
player should we call her up see if she wants to copy back I don't think Yvonne
would like it okay
if she's watching though um I'll I'll drop it somewhere safe you
can pick it up uh okay well that was
that was anticlimactic yeah now we are
on to the important one uh don't forget us
we think of you
to Barney Barney was my Camp name the
summer camp that I worked at all of the counselors had aliases to make it more
difficult to track us down after the fact that people were creepy and mine
was Barney which I chose on a whim at the beginning of Camp
here's a cassette of all the moments of
this summer on tem by Barney or on
tamore something probably Tim I would think basically we love you bye Barney
but like in a platonic way a more would be like a romantic way that's correct
right sorry I'm a little rusty haven't touched my French since this tape was
recorded and then oh in terms of capture do we just start like do we just use OBS
yeah well I just use OBS I just tweaked a few settings okay uh and I capture it
525i 525i why yeah uh you don't want to
upscale as much as possible Right you want it as close to what's coming out
because that way when it does come time to upscale you don't have your different
upscaling and processing Technologies fighting with each other by cubic
bilinear got it okay play I have no idea
oh my God it's me
August 6 2003
I think we're rehearsing one of the Camp's songs or Camp performances or
something I have no recollection of this whatsoever though there's a lot there's
like over an hour's worth of footage really yeah feel free to fast forward if
you want okay because there's no danger of doing any kind of damage to the tape
at this point you've already I've already uh copied it and put it through
a post processing that's necessary de-interlace it should be fine okay I
believe the songs we're singing here are Star Academy are you familiar with Star
Academy okay it's kind of a it's kind of a cringy like American Idol thing but
Quebec Canada only um some good songs actually if you don't
mind that uh on franciness of them and I remember
so so little of this can I point out one
thing yes you see when you fast forward yeah see how you can still see what's
going on yeah that's your heads that's what the heads do they make it so that
when you're paused or fast forwarding
you can see more of what's on screen so like a single head VCR which are like
dime a dozen you won't be able to see anything I mean this seems like it was
pretty early in the program is I probably could barely speak anything at
all what is this I don't know what that run is but apparently it's good so
um oh no
I want to come back in
oh I want her to turn off the camera why oh my God this is like I don't know that
I have ever been more mortified than
see 17 year old me oh wait is this it
yeah oh my God okay
I love this song
I'm so awkward
are you glad we made this a video it's me good
I will say if any of you are watching
um
uh the record day
Mercy so this would have been at the end then
because I I was actually interacting with people so I was there a month
there's kind of a hazing thing at the end I vaguely remember this and mine was
something to do with the theme that I had or the nickname that I had picked
oh wait no it's something else what is happening I think it's supposed to be
purple she's saying it's red um my nickname being Barney I think the
idea is I'm supposed to go purple with green spots
I wonder if any of these kids remember the weird like English anglophone at
their summer camp
uh-oh do I talk
Ed
I actually don't even understand what I'm saying I know monitors are Camp
counselors
the kids apparently are into it
no no no the thing the kids come up with
the thing for them to do and she had to propose to one of the other counselors I
actually do remember that because it was rough
okay she had to bathe in spaghetti yep
are we singing again please tell me we're not singing again pretty sure
you're singing again sorry
you're singing again I'm clearly I have no idea what's going
on I'm reading the okay no no we do not need anything again
oh my God
okay enough
if you were ever a kids camp counselor you would do the exact same stuff kids
love it and if you were like too cool to make a fool of yourself on stage then
you'd be a crappy camp counselor that's what I'll say everyone at the job was
not supposed to be allowed to speak English to me because most of them
actually spoke perfectly good English but that was the whole thing was they
had to like agree that they would never
speak English to me and to the credit of the entire counseling team they did not
do it they were like nope he will learn French or die trying oh my God no no
this we have to watch this stuff line is just bye
Grace
I will be curious to see how much of this I can actually understand when I go
back to watch it because not gonna lie pretty rough right now now
that we've captured this what can we do to improve the quality of it like
obviously this doesn't look great well first off you always keep your master so
whatever you take off there in the purest form keep it okay do I
keep the tape too or can I safely get rid of that at this point you can safely
get rid of it as long as the Masters back it up but I would still keep it
just in case something happens yeah but then I've seen pictures of your crawl
space you would keep it should I keep it look
you got an attic it's free real estate there's a few options for de-interlacing
sure ID interlaced with topaz Labs gigapixel AI I find it produces the best
results okay and I also upscale with that software too we've done a video on
that did you happen to process this in that way it sure did oh so we can look
at it now yeah we sure can oh cool okay all right so this is this is better yes
oh my God stop stop I don't want to hear it
um it's the interlaced oh okay uh it's
been upscaled but not a lot yeah I guess if you try and do too much you're gonna
honestly my face is so greasy and shiny
it looks like running a game from 2003
at high res you know how the textures are always like exactly like Far Cry one
oh man put a little bit of foundation have
killed me yeah it's not bad it's very watchable yep
I mean the quality not the content necessarily
this was definitely a cool exercise thank you very much for helping and I
think it actually leads pretty well into a discussion of you know archival and
backup strategies and how they're not as bulletproof as we might think they are I
mean think about yourself like you know once something is in your hand
reassuringly physical you think of it as backed up right but we often Overlook
that critical retrieval step
and it's it's non-trivial to solve that
problem once not everyone has a VHS player for example and VHS might be my
parents Generations problem but our generation has its own problems like do
you still have a DVD player nope and 10 years from now will you have a DVD
player in your house and then Zoomers you guys are going to come up against
your own challenges you might think of a cloud backup as a backup but even
compared to this I would make the argument that that's not a proper
archival storage medium you don't own it you don't control it and it could be
wiped out at the whim of Omega Corporation with basically no recourse
for you so same issue essentially you've got the
backup but when it comes time to look at it with your kids or your grandkids will
you actually be able to retrieve it in the way that I retrieved this message to
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