8mm Forum: I need professional advice on good quality VHS or SVHS machines!

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Posted by Osi Osgood (Member # 424) on December 29, 2014, 12:58 PM:

OK, I know that there has to be some guys or gals out there that have this old school stuff as well, and I have need of your special knowledge.

I am going to do a final re-edit of the romantic comedy feature film I directed and acted in while in college called, "Pink Bison 3 The Final Insult" (I'm going to release a lower resolution version of this final cut on youtube in a week or two, give yourself a good 30 minutes to watch it, you won't regret seeing me make a blithering fool of myself, on purpose!)

Well, this was mostly shot on VHSC and I fortunately have all the casettes, which haven't been played for over ten years, (and only to transfer them to DVD one time), so they are in (hopefully) good condition still but no doubt ... aging.

What VCR would you suggest that I should use? I have heard that perhaps I should shoot for a SVHS deck, as they have S video out capability and even better resolution than your standard VCR, but I also hear that there are modern (well, within the last few years VCR's out there that can quite frankly, make your footage actually look better than it even looked on the original equipment it was filmed on.

I am going to do the same cut of the film as I have now, but if I am going to save this film in HD for posterity, I want to make that old footage look as good as humanly possible, (and I have seen some pretty good restorations done on VHS tapes in the past).

Please note: Once I have transferred the footage on the best deck possible, I also plan on taking that selfsame footage and putting it through some form of "clean-up" software that can get as much of the "video-noise" out of the image before I then do color restoration on the footage, which I have the capability to do right now, but I want to wait on that until I have the footage looking as good as possible first, before that.

I EAGERLY await any advice any of you fine folks may have!

OSI

Posted by Claus Harding (Member # 702) on December 29, 2014, 05:52 PM:

Osi,

I assume you have the adapter for playing the smaller tapes in a regular VHS tape machine?

As far as decks, I can recommend the Panasonic AG series machines, the AG 1960 or AG 1980.

They are pro/industrial S-VHS decks that should get excellent quality out of your regular VHS tapes.

Make sure you get the original remote with them; I seem to recall they are needed for some functions.
Regardless of the machine, always test the transport with another tape so you don't ruin your good tapes.

Make sure to FF and Rewind your tapes before transferring them; it loosens up the layers when the cassettes have been sitting for a while.

Claus.

[ December 29, 2014, 08:13 PM: Message edited by: Claus Harding ]

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