Best tape format for recording SD games

[atheistgod1999]

I was thinking of getting a Betacam VCR, but I read it only records 90 minutes maximum. I want to do full runs of video games, so 90 minutes isn't enough for me. It would be nice if the tape were native RGB as well. It would also be nice if it supported composite, S-Video, and component as well as RGB.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Sounds like aches and pains not even many users here would willingly undertake rather than go fully digital. There should be dedicated vintage VCR forums out there, possibly more helpful in this regard.

[Ed Oscuro]

I'm sorry, but this is yet another of your crazy pie-in-the-sky nonsense idea threads. Beta tapes were reportedly being made up to the end of last year, but I don't know how good availability is, and players are going to be in an even worse state. I don't know why you'd want to spend the money on this even if you could find everything you needed; beta was only being produced for legacy users who couldn't upgrade to newer stuff, but that's not you. A totally digital capture setup makes more sense and will even save money - not to mention be more reliable, especially with SSD prices coming down dramatically in the last year.

[Shepardus]

Speedrun your games faster to make it fit within 90 minutes.

[trap15]

Buy a DVD recorder for $20 instead and save the hassle.

[Specineff]

Buy a DVD recorder for $20 instead and save the hassle.

This. You can later rip the video to your computer and de-interlace and/or upscale if you plan on uploading to youtube.

[Xyga]

Betamax or nothing.

[cicada88]

I would suggest looking into a professional U-Matic deck just to make sure your patented maneuvers can only be observed by the hardest of the core

[atheistgod1999]

I don't want to do something digital because of 2 reasons:
1. With tapes, I can rewind and immediately see what I just recorded on my CRT monitor without having to connect it to my PC and then wait to move it to my hard drive.
2. I want to have an analog master of my gameplay footage because analog-to-digital pretty much guarantees lost picture quality.

I was using VHS for my AV Famicom (we never got rid of our VCR ), should I keep using that for now?

[ryu]

And you expect your analog recording to be lossless?

[atheistgod1999]

And you expect your analog recording to be lossless?

Well, if it's a professional-grade tape, I expect it.

[Ed Oscuro]

I don't have any horse in the race of how retro/analog gear should be, but I think there's a few misconceptions here...

When you talk about "immediately seeing" what you recorded, do you think it's going to be faster to switch the video feed, wait for the VHS mechanism to disengage the read heads, rewind, and start again, than simply pulling a slider or punching a key (perhaps a couple times to stop recording / jump back the right number of frames) on a PC? As a benefit you don't have to switch the CRT over to replay, so this could be useful even for games that don't pause. Streaming video capture devices won't have any delay in transmitting the file to the PC, because it's already there. If you are sending a completed recording from a device to the PC that also doesn't have to be painfully slow, since we're talking about a small file size and some recorders might even have USB3 now. Of course, you could also set up the tape player with a second screen.

I also would note that VHS/Betamax aren't going to serve as a real tape delay, if you rewind the recording has been stopped, which seems to limit the usefulness of what you're describing. I suspect some live video capture software might have this function.

Onto number 2.) Beta and VHS are going to smash the color space of the original image, though this might not be noticeable, and they also won't respect the internal resolution of the actual files, which will be. Tape is also prone to a thousand and one other problems, some of which don't hit you until you try to use them: The player motor noise is annoying at close range. Two problems merit special attention: On PCs you can simply play a file back as long as you want, frame-stepping with ease and even setting up multiple jump points and toggling play speeds. On a tape player not only does this have to be supported in some way, but the physical act of rewinding the tape is much slower than the instant replay on a PC. And the more you rewind tape, the more stretched out it'll get. That might not be a problem for the case you have in mind, but as a rule: Analog recordings get more and more lossy as time goes on.

"Professional" with tape meant "maybe some cheap TV shows got away with it, and this is why you can't find a good high quality version of Welcome Back, Kotter" these days. But mainly it was the poorer brother to film, meant to be reliable and quick to use with no film processing step. Absolute quality was not a major market consideration in developing tape.

[atheistgod1999]

OK. What's a good capture card for all the different analog formats?

[Fudoh]

If you - for some reason - REALLY wanted to go with a tape format, you can get a digi beta machine. That's the tape format used for SD broadcast or DVD masters till very recently. Quality's amazing with a 90mbit codec that stores in 4:2:2 color format.

OK. What's a good capture card for all the different analog formats?

your best option is an Elgato HD Capture 60 Pro along with a video processor to bring all your analogue signals into the HDMI domain.

[atheistgod1999]

I'm thinking of using S-VHS for now, but I read on Wikipedia that the only improvement is that it has a higher luma resolution. It says it's still limited to VHS's 30 TVL chroma resolution, which doesn't make much sense. I put in a standard VHS tape and searched and found a color between two completely different ones (as in, not just a different shade) that was about a 50th the width of the screen, but I might be bad at estimating. Can others confirm other improvements?

[Specineff]

SVHS has a higher resolution, close to LaserDisc. I second Fudoh's suggestion of a Digi-Beta machine, though. Do you plan on uploading those runs at some points, or will the recordings be for your own personal archiving?

If you really want to bite the bullet, a Digital 8 VCR can also fit the bill. The Sony GV-D200 is only around 700 bucks on Amazon, give or take.

[atheistgod1999]

SVHS has a higher resolution, close to LaserDisc.

So does that mean less smearing/blur and video noise (aka overall sharper picture)? Also, is the tracking better and less generation loss?

I second Fudoh's suggestion of a Digi-Beta machine, though.

Wouldn't it be lossy due to it having to convert an analog signal to digital? I don't get how those work. Do they function just like other VCRs, having instant record and rewind and everything?

Do you plan on uploading those runs at some points, or will the recordings be for your own personal archiving?

Both.

[trap15]

Protip: analog isn't lossless either. (noise, temperature, etc.)

[Specineff]

AtheistGod, unless you're using D1 professional broadcast encoding, every single format you can use right now, be analog or digital, is going to be lossy. Perhaps you are thinking of artifacting, macro-blocking, etc as the lossy effects of digital formats, and you are mostly correct in that regard. But analog ones are also lossy. Color bleeding, ghosting, shimmering, and others are many maladies that the switch to digital formats solved.

What you want is to limit the amount of loss the best you can. Recording to a DVD and ripping to a PC for editing or uploading (let's ignore your need of rewinding and reviewing and the like for now) gets you only one instance of analog-to-digital conversion (Game system to recording device). Only one pass where information may be lost. (You may not even notice it)

Whereas your method of recording to tape, then recording to a computer for uploading gets you two steps: system to tape, tape to computer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tMSTPNE2Oo This was recorded by forum member Greg using one of those S-Video to USB solutions. He didn't upscale it (plus it was re-encoded one more time upon uploading to Youtube), but I can assure you it looks times better than a copy to analog tape would. You have to pick two out of convenience, price and quality, unless you have the big bucks. Tapes break down with time, and I don't think they're in production anymore.

So no. Analog is not lossless. Just un-digital.

[Ed Oscuro]

One more time: Typical analog formats all throw away a huge amount of information right in the recording step, even before you look at copy generations. There should be some pro variants which have more than enough headroom to record whatever you want, and clearly film (which is also analog) doesn't fit this definition. But...these still don't have any benefits over digital formats, lossless or not.

Any digital tape format is simply going to be a clunkier and less futureproof alternative to a more modern solution.

Perhaps you are thinking of artifacting, macro-blocking, etc as the lossy effects of digital formats,

None of these are going to be problems if you select a high enough bit depth, which isn't hard with 240p. This answer also obscures that you can choose if a digital recording gets lossy: I have a very good-looking AVI copy of an old superplay tape from '87 which I recorded many years ago with an old DataVideo USB2 converter. In a RAR, I think it's only 4GB, and that's for a long tape.

Also, that upload looks pretty bad tbh. Not a fair comparison due to YouTube, but it is worth mentioning that YouTube treats 720p more kindly than lower-res sources, I read. YouTube smashes everything, so that's more or less format agnostic. One thing sticks out though: I find that tape grabs tend to have ill-defined edges, but I've seen plenty of captures of scaled video here which look almost identical to emulator output - like the Guardian Heroes demo recording from one of the scaler threads in Hardware. That's real hardware, too, and it has none of the low contrast or ill-defined edges in this upload.

It's also a good example of how tape recordings are also display-agnostic...there's nothing CRT-like about it, no surprise there.

[Specineff]

^^ Yeah, forgot to mention that digital formats can look amazing with the proper encoding. Chalk it up to me trying not to foam at the mouth at the prospect of analog tape being used in this day and age. (No offense to you, AtheistGod.)

[Skykid]

Do you plan on uploading those runs at some points, or will the recordings be for your own personal archiving?

Both.

Awesome. That means I might finally get to see a guy clearing DBCS with 500 store bought lives.

[atheistgod1999]

Do you plan on uploading those runs at some points, or will the recordings be for your own personal archiving?

Both.

Awesome. That means I might finally get to see a guy clearing DBCS with 500 store bought lives.

[Skykid]

Sorry my bad. I mixed you up with xxx1993. Similar name, similar join date, similar post style.

Basically you but different.

[Ed Oscuro]

^^ Yeah, forgot to mention that digital formats can look amazing with the proper encoding. Chalk it up to me trying not to foam at the mouth at the prospect of analog tape being used in this day and age. (No offense to you, AtheistGod.)

See, this is a fine and dandy thing, but as I was once the guy who didn't know anything but had enough money to burn...I just wouldn't want to wish that on somebody else. Lotsa waste, lotsa disappointment. Best left to the pros who are doing it for nostalgia reasons / just wanting to push the hardware, but basically still impractical.