[Tim Nichols]

Using a pro dub house might be an option, but I was hoping to gather some skills and/or equipment to be one of those dub houses. The tapes are from family members so I am actually not getting paid much for this particular project. I was hoping to gather the skill set so I could recover this type of stuff for other clients (who are actually paying for the service).

I am in no particular rush so I am trying to gather as much know how to deal with this problem of hard to recover video. I think I am going to experience more problems like this in the future.

Tim Nichols
HomeMoviesBackToLife

[Tim Nichols]

It is not PAL. I recorded all the VHS tape segments before and after the bad segments on the same tape. When they bought a new camcorder, the problem went away on the recordings. On the first bad recording, the tape speed went from SLP, LP to SP during the same recording. It wasn’t paused. They certainly had a broken camcorder. Unfortunately they didn’t check their footage till weeks after it was recorded and didn’t know they had poor recordings till after the fact.

I am using both consumer and professional VHS decks now. JCV BR-S800U, Panasonic AG-1980, Mitsubishi D-VHS HS-HD2000U and others. To recover the audio I used the AG-1980 with TBC on and was able to record into PrPro without it stopping. The video is total shaky and unstable but the audio played back clean.

This footage is certainly on life support. I can be recovered frame-by-frame. I just need to figure out the how to.

Thanks for the responses.