I Thought My Childhood was LOST
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 Bueller VCR what's VCR 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 find 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 load screens their storage and memory options are built to be fast stable and 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 are 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 do 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 ag1980p that the community knows are 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 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 gonna 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 really run you into the many hundreds of dollars thankfully Mark here got a copy on what I'm told is a 1980 P 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 ossc 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 both 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 yeah 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 rude 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 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 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 that was wait what is this it went to Survivor wait this is Survivor wait so we got just the intro at the ends 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 zephons 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 watched TV on demand yeah this is Netflix this is Plex actually yeah 90s Plex is this 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 that I remember the sound mixing was like higher for commercials yeah they could detect that I'm just guessing right now though oh 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 I 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 thank you 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 by 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 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 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 copied it and put it through all 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 now 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 [Music] 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 thank you again [Music] [Laughter] 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 oh do I talk [Music] [Applause] [Music] Ed [Music] I actually don't even understand what I'm saying I know monitors are Camp counselors [Music] 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 nope no we do not need to do everything 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 say come on ballet bye 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 interlace 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 I sure did oh so we can look at it now yeah we sure can oh cool okay 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 generation's 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 our sponsor vessi do you hate wet socks as much as I do Vesti Footwear makes lightweight breathable and most importantly water resistant shoes so no more squelchy socks they're all squinchy their dime attacks material not only keeps your feet dry but keeps them 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2022-10-07 01:27
