While doing my daily job on my Macbook Pro, I have other Macs running other tasks. I have a G4/400 (with a boosted processor) that captures and archives audio DAT tapes all day, and my G4/867 captures video.

I am starting what will be a very long task of mastering and archiving a literal load (over 1000) VHS tapes.

I finally got the set up worked out:

Mitsubishi VHS -> Videonics Processor Plus analog “video mixer” -> Datavideo Time Base Corrector (TBC-1000) -> Sony DVMC-DA2 DV media converter box -> Final Cut Pro.

(wow - that took long even to type…)

I am choosing to correct some of the brightness, color and contrast issues in the analog stage, before the signal gets digitized, purely to save any further artifacts on the resulting DV25 NTSC video file. I ran tests, and doing it this way did make a cleaner looking file.

The results? Wow. I uploaded a video for reference. The audio is a straight pass, and the video is done in your typical “crap on the left, badass on the right” split screen effect. Excuse the interlaced look of the video. I didn’t bother to do anything about that for this quickie web video file.

Get your QuickTime ready, here comes the m4v file…

Sex Pistols - “God Save The Queen”
Live at the Winterland Ballroom, January 14th, 1978
(sourced from an old Warner promo VHS tape - 1st gen)