WEBVTT

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I spent thousands of dollars over the past 10 years on my perfect VHS capture

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system and I realized it was all for nothing when somebody messaged me on

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Twitter and told me about the Doomsday duplicator this is the Doomsday

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duplicator back in the day I would use something like this which it digitizes

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and captures over firewire composite

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video it worked at the time however

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you're still going through your composite out there's a lot of processing done on the actual VCR as

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well as in the device itself in the early 2000s it worked but there were

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always issues that's where this guy came in it does have a BNC connector right

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here but that's not capturing composite video that's capturing the RF signal

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from the VCR now something like this has its limitations you need a really Bing

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VCR to get decent quality if you're

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capturing older tapes which I am you need something that has the TBC with

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something like the Doomsday duplicator you don't need any of that in fact you

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can get the cheapest $20 VCR on Facebook

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Marketplace and get the same result because you're capturing from the RF

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test Point inside of this that doesn't

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give you the footage itself that gives you the RF samples digitized to

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something that you can decode on your computer at home so in my use case I'm

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capturing old family tapes and some of

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them you can't even recognize who's in

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them anymore and through the magic of

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VHS decode it's reversed the whole

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process and I can actually see people's

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faces again and it's kind of magical so

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another use case is preserving old media that has never been digitized or brought

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to DVD or any other digital platform one

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example is the Doomsday 86 project which

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was produced by BBC and this product is

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named after it was mastered to laser dis

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but never properly digitized and it

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would have otherwise been lost if it wasn't for the team that made this but

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that's not what we're going to do today we're going to capture a VHS

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tape you pick uh Mrs delire all right

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Pierce broen's PEC are glorious in this movie but not as glorious as our sponsor

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charge as Slim as a few credit cards

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their aluminum dis plus SSD enclosure magnetically attaches to practically any

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device letting you bring along up to 4 terabytes of additional storage for your

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music movies games and more it supports

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transfer speeds of up to 10 GB per second and even comes with a built-in

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data cable plus you don't even have to hog a USB slot thanks to its dual port

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ports that allow for up to 85 watts of pass through charging check it out using

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our Link in the video description today one thing I forgot to show you is the

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actual RF test point that we're connecting to there's many different

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little test points here and they're usually listed on this particular unit

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as TP so the one that I was looking for

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is called TP something envelope EnV all

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right so that's right there and this here is a ground there's also a test

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point for Hi-Fi audio which will give you a high-fi audio signal this guy

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can't capture it there are other products out there that can for today we

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are just capturing the video with that said let's uh let's watch Mrs doire so

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in order to connect to this I need to connect to this so that's the test point

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and that's the ground and it all comes down here and around and out here that

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is new that shouldn't be there Dan did this I am not good with solder Ing and

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that is connected to the RF test point

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now if you're not good at soldering there's also options for like alligator

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clamps like these two so you can just connect these to your test points and

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have uh your little BNC come go into this so capture software is pretty

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straightforward just got a big capture button right here and uh I'm just going

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to start playing the video I'm not doing a full capture because that would take

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hours so we're just going to start capturing now so as you can see there

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there are some issues visually with this tape right now we're capturing video

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only you can capture audio however I

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don't have anything set up for that at the moment I also don't need audio

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because most of the tapes that I'm capturing are family videos so there's

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not going to be much difference in terms of audio quality from an actual

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conventional capture once the capture is done you'll have to run it through the

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VHS decode software it is command line but don't worry

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it's very straightforward you'll be left with two TBC files one is for Chroma one

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is for Luma you can open them in LD analyze to see what everything looks

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like and check out the signal to noise ratio see if you have any line dropouts

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it's very straightforward and finally you can get your final output video

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through TBC tools again it's command line just make sure your files are all

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in the same folder as the software for more information there's a mass massive

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Wiki with all the steps it's very straightforward you might need about an

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hour to read through everything but once you're done you're good to go so looking

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at the side by side it should be pretty obvious the capture from the Doomsday

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duplicator is much cleaner it's much sharper there's way more color

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information it just looks better but this does come at a cost

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$500 or about $500 you can also build it

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yourself but currently there are other options that are pretty much better than

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this in every way the CX card with the clock gen mod is the gold standard Harry

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one of the main developers from bhsd code informed me that they are currently

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working on a new card the merch card

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that just has more options and can do everything the CX card can do and run

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through USB the CX card is a PCIe addin

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card if you're running it on a laptop this is probably your best bet there

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really is a lot and it's really hard to cover it all today you can check out the

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Discord and the wiki and the GitHub and

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it's a very active and Vibrant Community

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International and they are always looking for new contributors and people

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who are just interested in this project I know I am interested in this project

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so if you are to comment down below maybe we'll check out more stuff like

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this in the future maybe I'm going to get a merch card have a great day

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subscribe to ShortCircuit
