"undigitizing"

I exchanged e-mails with Harry at The Vista Group some months ago, prompted by a desire to see and manipulate a more raw form of one of his excellent releases. He was very kind, but it isn’t reasonable to expect someone to keep their ingest files, and in fact, he informed me that he does not usually do so.

I told him my reason for asking was that I “undigitize” video, by which I mean, I find something I believe my children should watch, I acquire it as a file off the Network and I ffmpeg it until it becomes a file that will fit nicely on a VHS tape.

The how of it

If you’re neurotic, I think you will find this is very fun, but it becomes wildly complicated the more attention to detail you pay. So I will explain the simplest version of the scheme first.

Acquire a computer between 18 and 25 years of age. Your elderly neighbor will give you theirs. If you are lucky, it already has an output for an analog television. Just look up “analog tv connectors” and then look at the back of the computer. Do the same to any computer you see at a thrift store. If you don’t get so lucky, fret not. Ebay an old GPU for your neighbor’s computer with the connector - it will be cheap. Here’s a Vogons thread with some model names. FX5200 seems like a good choice.

Acquire a VCR and tapes. Your elderly neighbor will be delighted to get rid of theirs - you can even digitize their old home videos and deposit them on a DVD as a thank you. They also sometimes still exist at thrift stores, but neighbors are really a better bet for these. Tapes can be found at a used book store in your town that is the designated tape store, sometimes Half Price Books. Ebay if you absolutely have to.

Acquire a television capable of taking a composite or S-Video signal. The cables are easy to come by at electronics outlets. The best TVs are CRTs and they can be found in alleys and the side of the road. If you can’t find one this way, try Craigslist or, Lifelog cough, I mean, Meta Facebook Marketplace. Search “old tv” or “tube tv.” Bring a friend to help you pick it up. If this doesn’t appeal to you in any way, whatsoever, then just like, do your own thing and make sure it takes composite (yellow RCA) or S-Video (mini-DIN).

Steal a video. Yes, I said it. Steal it. Download it from the Internet Archive or YIFY or whatever. But its important that you steal it, as it won’t have DRM on it. DVDs will likely work in this setup and Blurays will likely not. But you should give everything you have at your disposal a try, including makemkv for the discs that don’t work, and streaming services, because why not?

Plug the GPU’s TV connector into the input of a VCR, plug the output of the VCR into your TV, insert a blank tape, fullscreen your video to the TV output, press record on the VCR and then play on your computer. Voila! You have done a basic undigitizing.

Advanced Undigitizing

Now you get to start really having fun. Acquire newer hardware - broadcast grade stuff. Plenty of Blackmagic Intensity cards and USB boxes are good choices, but even cheap crap off Amazon labeled “HDMI to Composite” could be fun. Experiment. Find what looks best. Figure out what looks worse and why! Get an Extron or other broadcast brand VGA to composite downscaler. Or maybe even one from a dropshipper on Amazon again! Run it at the highest resolution you can put out on the VGA port of your old GPU. Does that look better? Get a better VCR! Get better tapes!! There’s so much to improve.

Expert Undigitizing

I’m joking, of course. I can’t consider myself an expert, mainly because I wasn’t a broadcast video professional in the relevant era, but I am probably one of the most skilled people at this specific thing, so here’s what I do:

Acquire something that can record a DV stream onto a VHS tape directly. Yes, this is possible. Look and you will find devices with a VHS side and a DV side. If the options are only expensive (you should look harder), try a camcorder and a VHS-C first, to prove to yourself its actually as good as I say. The best choice is something with S-VHS ET (or S-VHS if you can find the tapes cheaply) recording capabilities, and if you don’t intend to use it to watch the tapes you record, you must get a playback deck of the same brand, otherwise tracking will ruin your fun.

Get good tapes. Tapes that are good for S-VHS ET may surprise you. I find that double-wrapped Maxell Bronzes look nearly as good as a sealed box of Sony Dynamicrons. Maxell HGX Gold are nice, but not even as good as the plentiful Purple and Blue case Sony Premium Grades. Don’t bother with Memorex - total garbage. BASF gets talked up too much. I figure Fuji is crap because even their S-VHSes look worse than the aforementioned Maxell Bronzes. MGM is trash. You get the idea.

Acquire an old Apple computer of the OSX vintage (excepting 10.15). Make sure it has a FireWire connector. I am not intentionally a vintage Apple collector, so I have little in the way of guidance on this. If your neighbors are rich, then maybe the previous advice holds. If you can dig up old Hackintosh guides and kexts for a computer you have with a DV port, that could also work. There is even a possibility, and I do not know this for sure, that you could do some advanced QEMU’ing and use a TI chipset FireWire PCIe card in essentially any PC. Amazon or whatever a FireWire (or DV, in the Hackintosh case) to DV cable. Acquire Final Cut Pro - version probably doesn’t matter, but I use 7. Do NOT use FCPX. It is a different program and will not do what we want to do. If you must use OSX 10.13 or 10.14, acquire a program called “Retroactive” from its Github release page and install it.

Install ffmpeg on it or on something newer/faster if you’re the impatient type. Put all the video files you want on tapes in a folder. Ensure you have many gigabytes or even terabytes of storage available. Do one of these:

 1mkdir ./out
 2
 3for file in ./*.(webm|mkv|mp4)
 4do ffmpeg -i "$file" \
 5-sws_flags lanczos+accurate_rnd+full_chroma_int \
 6-vf "scale=704:-1:flags=lanczos,setfield=mode=bff" \
 7-c:v prores_ks -profile:v 2 -r 30000/1001 -flags +ilme+ildct -vendor apl0 \
 8-c:a pcm_s16le -ar 48000 \
 9"out/${file%.*}.mov"
10done

Go live your life. For a long time. IvyBridge Mobile 2c/4t, it runs about realtime. YMMV. I don’t know if it works in Bash; its designed for Zsh.

Now, get the files onto the old Apple computer. Open FCP and open your Sequence settings. I don’t know any version beside FCP7, so adjust as you need. Use the NTSC/DV preset as it comes, though if “Frame blending for speed” is checked, uncheck it, as well, make sure the rendering quality is set to “best.”

Drag your output folder from the ffmpegging into the Clip Bin in the top left pane. Drag and drop each video file onto the timeline from the bin, making sure not to exceed the length of your tape, which is usually about 2 hours and 2-4 minutes for a 6 hour tape and 2 hours and 40-ish minutes for an 8 hour tape. FCP refers to to the time on the timeline start as 1:00:00, so a 2 hour timeline will end at 3:00:00. There will be a pop-up asking if you want to change the sequence’s settings to match your clip. It is imperative that you select No. This is how we shortcut figuring out how to make your specific video’s aspect correct for analog NTSC; FCP knows how and will do it for us.

Select the “downstream arrow” tool and click the second clip on your timeline. Click and drag something like 5-10 seconds away from the first clip. Repeat the process all the way down the timeline to prevent jarring jumps between video clips. Select “Sequence” from the topbar menu, “Render All,” and finally, “both.”

Your videos are ready to print to a tape. Now you must set up your DV transfer deck. It’s late and I’m tired so I don’t really want to get into this part, but I will expound on it in another post.

Make sure your deck is on. Plug in both sides of your FireWire (or DV) to DV cable. Once you have ensured that FCP can see your deck as an external display, choose “File,” “Print to Video.” You shouldn’t need to mess with any settings in the popup that appears, so just press okay. Now, on your deck, turn on the DV side. Switch the input to F-1 or whatever your deck calls “front.” Press the “dub to VHS” button. Switch on the VHS side of the deck. Pop in your tape, press record. After a ten-or-so second lead time, press okay again in FCP. Wait until the your computer screen turns from black to the FCP editor again, i.e., the length of your tape.

You’re done! Rewind and enjoy a VHS that looks like a somewhat soft DVD. It’s beautiful and was worth it.