Gadgetory

hey guys welcome back to Pauls hardware today's video isn't going to be about testing graphics cards or building a computer but I think you'll still find it interesting because I have some new equipment here that I'm going to be integrating into my home studio got this fancy new digital camcorder that records unto DV tapes and of course captures via firewire so to clarify for anyone who might be confused today's video is about archiving my old footage from all of these old DV tapes so no none of this stuff is new in fact a lot of it is very old and one of the issues I had when attempting to get my old footage off of these these tapes by the way or from some projects I did back in college as well some work with the church that I used to attend to even playback these tapes though I needed a camera that could play DV tapes these tapes did it record digitally and still do they're still functional and actually you can still buy these tapes that are out there although they're less practical now for one they record onto tape so that means that they do have a finite lifespan also for those kids out there who have never dealt with something like this it's got a spool up onto these tool pieces on either side so that means there's moving parts that means the tapes themselves can fail over time the tape itself can wear out over time especially if it's exposed to light the cameras themselves did tend to launch at a time when you could get cool stuff like a flip-outs LCD screen which was pretty unique at the time LCDs were still very expensive and just coming out but more importantly the DV tapes themselves have this cool loading function pops out like that it kind of reminds me of like Robocop when you put this gun away a little bit but these can wear out over time as well so eventually if you have an old DV camera it's going to die now when I originally recorded most of this footage I wasn't using this camera here I was using a nicer camera so if you guys will bear with me as I reminisce and maybe get a little nostalgic about some of the earlier video projects I made they were recorded on TV many of them are saved on these tapes I'm going to attempt to load the tapes into this camera capture them via firewire onto this system using modern-day Windows 10 as well as Adobe Premiere but how did I actually record these videos a lot of them are recorded on the Canon GL one which is a mini DVD camcorder which apparently you can still buy on Amazon somehow which is kind of insane look you can get it used on Amazon for like 175 to 250 dollars but this camera was absolutely drool-worthy at the time for a sort of a prosumer crossover camera and had fancy features like 20x zoom and 3c CDs that was the big selling point at the time when it came to capturing digital video you had some cameras that used a single CCD for all colors the go1 had 3c CDs one for red one for blue one for green to give better color reproduction among other things but still recorded using just standard ntsc I believe 525 line format so not necessarily super-high resolution or anything like that and I just thought it was interesting scrolling through some of these older specs like the three CCD specs 270,000 pixels per CCD 250,000 effective it gives you specs like how long standard play DV tapes will record 480 minutes or you can do long play which is a hundred twenty minutes but then you get less detail but I think one of the big features of this camera at the time and I believe it used to retail for about 1400 ish maybe $1,800 as a lens f one point six to two point nine which is pretty nice along with that zoom four point two to 84 millimeters look you can also get it on eBay for 250 bucks just like today where a nicer camera and a nicer lens is gonna get you better image quality this nicer gl1 camera got me a better image quality on these old DV tapes I made this camera that I got to hopefully capture them is not nearly as nice though I think I got this for about 40 bucks on eBay a while back when I first started getting the idea that I wanted to do this project and back up these tapes it is a samsung s CD 27 and it comes with fancy features like a memory stick look at that that's 128 megabytes memory stick as well as of course firewire connectivity which was very popular in the time because firewire is much faster than the original USB one I was hoping it might have a USB output it did not so what I now need is a computer to capture from this camcorder that has firewire and I don't really have that just kind of sitting around my first idea was to try to repurpose this old card which is actually the card that I used to capture firewire with which is a creative labs soundblaster Audigy sound car which is a really good sound card for the time and actually does have a FireWire port integrated into it however it is pci so i would need a computer that has a pci slot so i kind of need to go get a slightly older build and put that together in order to make use of this card so as kind of a shortcuts I went on Amazon and I found this from the Amazon warehouse deals a two port one three nine four B firewire add-on card which is PCI Express and also according to the feedback on the Amazon product page should work with Windows 10 with default drivers so that was another thing that I was somewhat concerned about I do believe this is used because it's an Amazon warehouse product that has stickers on it and everything it is a cybo product and pretty straightforward it's a low profile card they give you a longer bracket in here apparently had a disc that shipped with it at some point but who cares about that but here's the card itself nice and small compact so I am going to first hunt down a firewire cable and then I'm gonna plug this into my capture system over here and see if I can fire it up and get it working so got the card installed fortunately in PCI Express expansion card installation it's pretty simple now I've got my firewire cord over here and I need to decide which of these tapes I'm going to start out with I have one tape here that just has a line on it and that means that I striped the tape this is something that you guys don't have to worry about these days if you're recording on SD cards it lays down a timecode across the entire tape which means if you're capturing it on a device won't like a computer most likely that you can tell it in and out points and this was an older method of capturing where you could scrub through the entire tape tell it all the in and out points to capture and then say capture and then the system would rewind back to that and capture just those in and out points that you suggested if you don't lay down a timecode for the entire tape first then when you stop it might jump forward a frame or two and then restart the timecode back at zero so that's why you stripe the tape fortunately we don't have to do that anymore that's one of the benefits of the full digital recording that we have now in SD cards there might be something on this but I think I might have just stripped it and then put the line on it which is what I indicated there this tape just says Vegas that one should be interesting and then finally I've got four more DV tapes here that are all from my cinema classes that I took back when I was attending USC I got of my own volition by the way had a scholarship even briefly to I was a bad college student I'm getting off on a tangent here point is I'm very interested to see what's on these but first off was that card I just installed even recognize let's go over here the device manager here and we can see there it is I Triple E 139 for host controller apparently Texas Instruments makes the actual one there so from there we can pull up premiere and I'm going to be doing trial and error here because it's been a while since I actually tried to capture from tape with premiere although it should have those functions built-in somehow capture oh there it is capture device offline at this point I want to get this camera going hit play it reflects play here on the capture function in Premiere and here's where I was mentioning if you have a long DV tape with a bunch of footage on it and it was 10 or 15 years ago you could play the entire tape back and then you could set a bunch of in and out points here and you can actually name all of those clips as well then you tell it to capture in/out or capture tape and then it would go back and capture the whole thing but again it can only do that if it has timecode that is down which apparently this tape does not have whenever I make a video about something like this a project that I really not sure how it's gonna go I always think to myself like what if everything goes wrong not that everything is going wrong right now but we are encountering some dilemmas several of the tapes have tried so far have not been playing back properly in this DV camera there's a couple possible reasons why that might be one might be that the readhead itself has gotten smudged up so I'm gonna try to clean that right now I've removed this piece just to give myself a little bit more access to it thanks to my iFixit kit there I was having some difficulty getting playback on some of these DV tapes over here the Vegas one in particular I know there's footage there but it was having weird banding issues going across and nothing seemed to be playing back at the right speed there's a SP standard play in LP which is long play that you can record with DV tapes and I don't think this camera is properly identifying which mode they were recorded in so when it's playing it back it's very slow and the audio is kind of messed up I have discovered there's a project on this tape that is playing back properly on this camera so if I can get that to reappear here again with the image and everything on premiere which was working just fine at least for one of them the playback on the camera was all janky but it was at least appearing over here with the audio and everything if I can get that and I think that's one project I can at least pull over for now and that would at least give me the feeling like I haven't wasted my time today but anyway but I'm not going to attempt to use this q-tip to clean off the reed head in there I don't have a whole lot of confidence for one q-tips aren't the best tool for this since it can scratch that Reed sensor but this came with the camera cleaning kit so I'm hoping it'll be all right and I don't seem to have any coffee filters anymore so here goes I'm just kind of gently brushing across the top of it I don't have any alcohol or anything going on right now it doesn't seem that dirty to me either so I have no idea if this is gonna help so I've skipped forward a little bit guys because trial and error when you're trying to figure out something like this isn't all that interesting to watch I just wanted to show how I've actually gotten some level of functionality out of this so right now we are capturing on this computer however for some reason and it's probably just because it's an old camcorder or something like that it's not actually playing back on here so that was one thing that took a while to figure out why is it actually showing up here finally I just hit record and let it play and I was like oh it actually is capturing the video not capturing the audio however so I heard recapture audio I've concocted this sort of intermediary got an AV cable here which this has an AV out which just goes over to a composite video out as well as RCA left and right out you've used those with an adapter to go into my soundboard so basically I did one pass through this capturing with Adobe Premiere and then I did another pass with it just outputting the audio and capturing that directly via my soundboard then I can take both of those and sync them in Premiere and end up with hopefully a finished video that's is more or less what I actually originally recorded on the DV tape now obviously this is not an ideal solution and if I had a bunch of DV tapes to back up it's not something I would want to go through with but fortunately there were actually only a couple things that I really wanted to get off of these DV tapes there's some other stuff too that I might still try to dive into but there were two projects that I did towards the end of my time as a film students and I really wanted to get them off of here just to watch them again 18 or so years later as well as to just have for my own backup purposes and I also wanted to share them with some of my friends who were who were actors quote-unquote in these videos themselves now unfortunately I can't share these videos with you guys directly or at least I can't post them here because they use a lot of copyrighted content when it comes to mu you can audio but what I will do is after I have synced them up back here and rendered them back out I'll upload them as unlisted videos and I'll put links to those down in this video's description so guys please be nice and remember that these are student film videos that I made 18 plus years ago and I'll put links to those down in this video's description if you want to check them out and let me know in the comments what you think of them as well as my friends acting abilities which I'm sure have greatly improved since then as well but the way I was capturing the audio just to clarify here was piping it to the sound board and then using OBS to capture that using premiere to capture the video and it looks like I've at least ended up being able to splice together a couple video projects that I was looking forward to recapturing off of here just to have for my own archives as well as to share with my old friends because I'll be sending them links to these as well the video quality in case you guys are wondering is 720 by 480 when it comes to resolution the bitrate at least that it was captured at his 30 megabit which seems a little high that's probably smore to do with what premiere was encoding it at vs. what it was actually captured on the DV tape 30 frames per second though and then I think to follow up with my the rest of my stack of DV tapes here what can I do with these I think the answer that I've come up with and doing some research about the different cameras is that not all DV cameras especially old camcorders that you might be trying to repurpose as a DV deck are gonna operate just the same there's variances between the different brands and then there's also the possibility that it was originally recorded in standard play or long play and there's even extended play as well which I don't think I messed with but is also something that could potentially throw a wrench in there so I think what I'm gonna have to do for the rest of these if I still want to capture and archive them is maybe get a different camera I might look into getting an actual Canon camera cuz I think that's what these are originally recorded with but I'm gonna have to keep an eye out for deals on that because I think for now I'm happy with what I've captured thus far and hopefully you guys enjoy it too one final thing today's video was not really intended to be a tutorial it was more like hey guys I'm doing this let me kind of take you along for the ride and see what happens but I do have some other old projects that I might want to capture as well those are on VHS VHS requires a VCR it's analog only there are other variables that get thrown into the mix when you're talking about capturing footage from old VHS tapes but I think there's a slightly higher chance that some of you out there might have old VHS tapes that you want to backup digitally for more so than those who might still have old DV tapes so let me know what you think of that idea in the comment section down below and for now but thumbs up button if you enjoyed this video and feel free to check out my student film videos linked down in the description they're unlisted for now and again please please be kind thanks again for watching guys we'll see you next time