The H.264 Era is Here (and that’s a good thing for old videotapes)
At NAB (National Association of Broadcasters Trade Show), a company called Black Magic Design unveiled a pair of products designed to take composite or s-video from tape decks, camcorders, and anything else tyhat provides standard definition video and convert the signal in real time to H.264, a high quality compression form that is rapidly becoming the standard for iPod, AppleTV, iPhone, YouTube, and video podcasts. A company called Elgato has had a similar device available for the MAC for some time.
According to Black Magic:
“Because videotapes such as VHS degrade over time, there are millions of hours of home movies sitting on old videotape that need to be converted to computer files or transferred to mobile devices such as iPods, so you can show family and friends!” said Grant Petty, CEO, Blackmagic Design. ”But there are also millions of hours of professionally videotaped programs that need to be moved to computers so they can be sold to customers online, or used in IPTV applications. I feel this is an incredibly important product for moving all that television content into the future. The future is mobile and in your hand!”
That’s the press release’s exclamation point.
Included with the USB hardware is the Video Recorder software which lets customers capture video with easy to use controls. When this software is used with the Video Recorder SDI model, users can enter in and out points for the deck they are capturing from. The Video Recorder software also allows users to set video scaling to reduce the resolution for mobile devices. To make great captured movie files, the Video Recorder software allows interactive cropping of the video edges, so analog blanking, VHS switching marks, and VITC timecode artifacts can be cropped out.
If you’re producing Tribute videos, corporate history videos, or anything that requires the use of old analog tape materials, these babies should be a godsend. Essentially, your video goes to your hard drive already converted and ready for editing (in many edit programs.)
H.264 is always going to look better than your old Betamax or VHS tapes, so there should be no apparent degredation.
Of course, for really awesome digitizing of old video signals, I still recommend the Canopus ADVC-300, which has a time base corrector built in.
Brien Lee
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