When I import from vhs to a computer    into Pinnacle 16 some scenes are ok but some will have this grey sign with a cirkle Arrow meaning i can't see the picture frame

I use König Video Grabber. The format is mpeg 4 which i turn into avid files

I can see the whole film on the timeline without  these grey signs with the cirkle Arrow but when I export it and create an image the grey signs are there

 Any one who knows

Windows 7

Radeon 5670

 

Tommy/Sweden

VHS is an unstable format and it seems as though there are frames missing when you are capturing. The use of a timebase corrector might help. Some domestic VHS recorders are equipped with these and they do contribute to picture stability.

What version are you using?  Have you updated to the latest program patch?

And welcome to the forum.  

I have the latest update

Sometimes it works fine, most of the time. sometimes not

Strange is that it can happen when using the same video casette  where i pick out certain scenes- some ok  some not

 Regards

 

Tommy Sweden

That is probably because the instability is variable and dependent upon the tracking of the tape. Sometimes it may read it cleaner than others.

Remember that a video tape is a magnetic thing. A lot of damages due to external magnetic fields (loudspeaker) can happen on a portion of the tape and not on the other.

In addition to the suggestions abouit the stability of the original VHS recordings, it might be worth considering the behaviour and features of the capture device too...

1. When capturing directly as MP4, does it do that "on the fly" as it captures, or does it capture in some intermediate format first and then save as MP4 once the capture is stopped?
   
   
2. If capturing directly as MP4, how much CPU usage is there? If CPU usage is high (say an average greater than 50%), does the device offer other capture formats? If it provides it, I would suggest DV-AVI (this is quite often done by hardware inside the capture device itself, so much lower CPU load). Also DV-AVI uses "intraframe" compression only, so is much more tolerant of frame drops/frame skips than something that depends upon groups of frames (MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264 etc). File size will be larger, but you can always convert to MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264 etc. for archiving. And, editing DV-AVI is much smoother than editing in a highly-compressed format as there is much less CPU workload while previewing, etc.
   
   
3. Does the capture device have a setting to improve the capture of poor quality tapes (some Pinnacle capture devices had a "VCR" setting that made them more tolerant of less-than-ideal video signals (enabling you to capture something rather than just considering the unstable frame(s) as not being valid and throwing them away)!
   
   

 HTH
Richard

Added: I Googled for the video grabber's spec - apparantly doesn't offer DV-AVI, but it might be worth trying the capture as an MPEG-2 file as that codec might be less CPU-intensive than H.264. Another idea may be to try it in a different USB port in case it's conflicting with some other device